Teacher-made Toys And Learning Material In Kindergarten Activity Areas And Effectiveness Research

The fact of that after the curriculum reform in the kindergarten the needs of environmental material were increasing, which made teachers to develop lots of educational resources which conformed to kindergarten's curriculum. As a result, teacher-made toys & learning material had been greatly increasing. And the educational principle of children called high quality with low cost recently had been put forward, which especially emphasized taking full advantage of material. Accordingly, the utility analysis of teacher-made toys & learning material had been related.The author had done a research on teacher-made toys & learning material which were input in children's activity areas of a kindergarten. Via the investigation of the actuality of teacher-made toys & learning material input, the author found out the category of teacher-made toys & learning material, the demands of curriculum of them, the time which teachers had spent on making them, the educational appropriations of buying toys & learning material and the management of them. With the case study, the cost of teacher-made toys & learning material, the influencing factors of their operating period& unilization ratio, and the effectiveness of the method of toys & learning material input had been analyzed. The methods of field investigation, observation and interview had been taken in this research.It was clear that toys & learning material made by teachers were more than which were directly input. Teachers had spent too much time and energy on making them. Lack of money for buying toys & learning material was not the reason, for the raw and processed materials of more than a half of teacher-made toys & learning material had been bought. The real reason was that the primary aim of teachers making toys & learning material was for the theme learning, but there were few toys & learning material which was for theme learning on the market. As a result, there were much more teacher-made learning material than teacher-made toys.The cost-utility analysis of teacher-made toys & learning material was based on the research on the relationship of making cost and unilization ratio. The influencing factors of operating period& unilization ratio of teacher-made toys & learning material had been researched from 5 aspects, there were the applicability of operating method, the versatility of material, the challenge of developmental objective, the degree of operating freedom of material, and the firmness of material. With the case study, it was found that the effectiveness of many teacher-made toys & learning material was low. And non-structured input method and material arrangement could produce new value, then improved the effectiveness.It was also shown that teachers' attitude to teacher-made toys & learning material was inconsistent. They thought it was necessary to make toys & learning material by themselves, but it was also overburden to them. As for the speciality of teacher-made toys & learning material, teachers had attached importance to the handworked skills, but didn't realize that it also included the understanding of curriculum and children's development. And it resulted in the low effectiveness of teacher-made toys & learning material.Based on the result observed, the conclusions were made as teachers should have part of decision-making power of buying toys & learning material; teachers should consider both of the economic cost of material and human cost; it also should be considered if teacher-made toys & learning material could be substituted by other material; it should be considered the effectiveness from the unilization ratio of teacher-made toys & learning material; the proportion of direct input of material should be heighten; material arrangement should also be adopted; the best way to test the high quality with low cost of children's activity areas was the way that cost lowest while got biggest effectiveness.