Living Garden

Our objective is to achieve skills beneficial for physical, mental and social health collectively called the “healthy lifestyle”.

Due to the fact that our nursery school is attended by children living in blocks of flats, housing estates, and city centres where the environment is not really ideal for their healthy development, we focus on developing those skills and experience which the children can use to influence not just themselves but also the world around them.

Long-term Development Plans

We create a quality nursery school which enables children to enhance basic competences through playing, group learning, and working with different topics. We encourage children to develop their skills, knowledge, abilities and attitudes in basic areas of life and learning. We provide children with enough freedom and opportunities to control their lives by themselves within the scope of their abilities given mainly by their age and degree of development. We base our everyday work on these beliefs but when it comes to using them in practice, we try to be adaptable and open opportunities for enjoyable experiences.

We fully realise that there's no better place in the world for building a positive relationship towards the environment but the place where the child grows up. The children attending Fantazie live in the city centre or large housing estates. Therefore, we understand that their relationship towards the environment and nature is more or less theoretical. Early childhood is a very special development period, very sensitive to external stimulation. It's a period during which we can do a lot of positive things for further development of a person but at the same time, we can do a lot of harm. The positive attitude towards the environment is naturally encoded in children and needs to be further developed and strengthened. This way, we can raise children to become responsible people, willing to help others; people who value their surrounding environment. The stimuli we provide the children with positively influence them in their everyday life, children become more considerate and sensitive. In the modern fast-moving world, a school garden is very often the only way of maintaining children's contact with nature.

Therefore, also us, the teachers of our nursery school, try to transform the classic concept of a school garden as a playground developing children's motor skills into a place where they learn to perceive through all their senses, learn about living and non-living nature, learn the rules of the world and perceive nature as a whole place where natural changes happen. We want to teach children to be a part of the world which needs to be protected for ourselves as well as for the future. Being in the garden, children will develop their physical, mental and social independence which is necessary for their further life.

The naturally shaped garden offers children enough physical activities, the opportunity to experiment with materials such as wood, soil, water, to observe different animals and plants in their natural habitat and enjoy the change of seasons.

The necessary prerequisite for this purpose is a very good location of the garden. Although it is located near blocks of flats, it is placed in a large area with mature trees and natural environment. It was this area that inspired us to create a natural garden. In addition to the routine maintenance of the garden, which children and teachers participate in, we have gradually begun to build various elements of a natural garden.

We have made several big flower beds and rock gardens. In cooperation with children, we have planted thornless raspberries, strawberries, peas, and we have sown pumpkin seeds. We have made a herb bed. We have bought gardening equipment for children and other tools for observing animals.

With children's help, we buy and plant bushes and plants. We have made simple vegetable and flower beds.

Our school garden is a place where garden events take place (theatre shows, garden opening and closing events, preschoolers' ceremony, thematic events).