Designing learning experiences together with children

Children’s participation in early childhood education context has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Participation means involving and enabling children to take part in decision-making processes about their everyday life. Educators are supporters and enablers of participatory practices. The process of planning activities is an important part of educator’s profession in early childhood education and it can be viewed as a designing learning process. But not only as adults designing children’s learning, but also children’s participation should be designed and finally children should be taken to take part in designing their own learning. In this paper we focus on children’s chances to participate the design learning process in Finnish day care groups. The research data was collected from teams of educators working in day care groups via survey. It was found that children’s participation to the design learning process is average: In evaluation of activities they can participate more than in planning or implementing activities.