Presenting the selection of innovative approaches taken in physical activities in the pre-school period

The society's expectations towards preschool teachers are high, which is why their role is becoming more complex, requiring a higher level of professionalism. Recently, experts have been highlighting innovative approaches in different areas of teaching. Pre-school teachers are the holders of initiative and ideas, must be creative, self-initiative, responsible, autonomous and professionally competent. Last but not least, they must be innovative, that is, having the will, the knowledge and the ability to use and realise a good idea. Therefore, pre-school teachers need to be trained, educated and acquainted with various aspects of teaching physical activity. With the acquired knowledge and experience teachers can express their creativity in the field of movement as well. The problem of our research is to determine whether pre-school teachers use innovative approaches to physical activity in kindergarten. The aim of our reearch is to use the questionnaire to establish whether and what kind of innovations are used by the pre-school teachers in providing physical activity. The sample is non-random and has been intentionally selected. 115 pre-school teachers (of these 5 males) from 12 Slovenian regions decided to participate in the research. The average age of men is 29.6 and of women 42.1. There are 32 teachers who are employed in the first age group, 65 teachers in the second age group and 18 teachers in the combined class. We found that pre-school teachers with higher education less frequently plan physical activities in the playroom (rho = -0.18; p = 0.050), and that there are more outdoor activities (rho = 0.22; p = 0.018). In addition, teachers who work with the first age group perform outdoor activities more frequently than the teachers who teach in the second age group. From the analysis of the obtained data, we find that pre-school teachers prefer choosing the proposed curriculum contents and activities than innovative approach. Namely, the curriculum represents the professional basis for work process in kindergarten and introduces the possibilities of how to achieve the intertwined goals from different fields of learning. We find that preschool teachers do not distinguish between the concept of innovative approach and creativity, as well as between the activities from the field of movement that are listed in the curriculum for kindergartens. Therefore, it is useful to provide training for preschool teachers to learn the differences between the mentioned concepts. The latter can be checked with a questionnaire at the end of the training.