This study reports on pre-school age children becoming familiar with
their hometown’s cultural history through children’s literature,
personal stories, and craft products. The aim of this study is to
discuss the educational value of arts-based activities and authentic
learning environments from the perspective of visualizing children’s
experiences. In the learning process, children create stories and craft
products based on a picture book of a home museum in their town and the
experience of visiting the museum. The research is in line with the
curriculum of Finnish pre-schools (valid from 2016), according to which
children should be offered opportunities to empathize with their
immediate environment using a variety of arts-based methods as support.
The theoretical framework of this study is based on Kolb’s model of
experiential learning, different approaches of arts-based learning and
the theory of situated learning by Lave and Wenger. The data consist of
children’s oral follow-up stories and craft products. The data were
analyzed using qualitative content analysis, which is a valid replicable
method for making specific inferences from text to other states or
properties of a source. It appears that different learning environments
and arts-based, experiential activities contribute to learning in a
child-centered way and may vizualize children’s thoughts and
experiences, for the teacher, for the children themselves, and for other
learners. The different stages of the experiential learning process
proved to be beneficial to each other: The materials the children
produced during the experiment could be used to activate educational
discussions in pre-schools and make them more child-centered. In
addition, the literature element and the authentic experience gave the
children ideas for their own products.