"The situational approach is an invitation to engage with the children in life"
Jürgen Zimmer
Accompanying families and children's development is our greatest motivation. On the one hand, our educational work is based on the legal foundations of the Rhineland-Palatinate Day Care Centre Act, the education and upbringing recommendations for day care centres of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate and the Social Code VIII. On the other hand, the image of the child, the pedagogical concept of the situational approach and the latest scientific findings on the education of children also form our pedagogical foundation. We see our facility as a place of security, experience and learning. Doing things together, playing, doing handicrafts, experimenting, singing, celebrating festivals, going on outings and laughing together is the best way for children to discover and conquer the world, in short, to learn.
Successful education and upbringing need the cooperation of adults. Professionals in the day care centre and parents as experts for their children work together in partnership at Kita Lindwürmer.
The continuous development of our team and the pedagogical work corresponds to our idea of quality. The transparency of our work is another important quality feature.

Children are endowed with their own rights from the very beginning. They have a sense of self-will and a sense of community. The sense of self-will is shown by their self-determination and their striving for freedom. The public spirit shows itself through the search for community and needs social contacts.
Every child is special and develops uniquely. They are constructors of their own development and independently determine the necessary steps and their pace based on their individual developmental needs. Children bring with them a foundation of resources and competencies, which they continually expand due to their natural desire for further development. They are curious and eager to learn. The fundamental joy of learning motivates them to deal (self-)actively with themselves and their environment.

The basis of all learning lies in relationships - without secure emotional bonds, children cannot develop freely and autonomously. On the basis of relationships that provide security and safety, children explore their environment and make educational experiences. The quality of the relationship has a great influence on the emotional, linguistic and social development of the children.

Our daycare center works according to the pedagogical concept of the situational approach. We have decided to work according to this concept, because for us the life situations of the children and their families form the starting point for the development of the children. This concept serves us as a tool to accompany and support the children in their development, as well as to perceive the individual needs of the families and to include them in our pedagogical considerations. The situational approach places the child and his or her family at the center of our pedagogical work. Learning situations are developed from the individual life situations of the families and the claim is formulated that children, adolescents and adults can shape their living environment together and influence social processes. The goal of the situational approach is to enable all children to acquire competencies with which they can act independently, in solidarity and in a competent manner in a changing world. Knowledge, skills and abilities are not acquired in artificially created situations, but in their normative and meaningful contexts. Factual and social learning form a unit and support personal development. Children can thus acquire different competencies in one and the same situation, depending on their previous experiences, their prior knowledge, their developmental interests and their temperament.

In pedagogy, participation means sharing decisions that affect one's own life and life in the community and finding solutions together. Our work as pedagogical professionals begins with perceiving the interests and needs of the children and becoming aware of their individual developmental stages. This enables us to act in a goal-oriented and timely manner. Taking into account the children's living environments and the resulting socially relevant topics, we work with them to create a stimulating and challenging environment. We pay special attention to encouraging and strengthening the children's participation at all times. We allow participation and live it in our daily kindergarten routine. Therefore, we see ourselves as teachers and co-learners at the same time and seek constant exchange with the children. In this way, we can accompany and support them in their learning processes in the best possible way. It is important for our pedagogical work that we treat the children in an appreciative and empathetic manner so that we can build up an intimate and reliable relationship with them. This is essential for us (see Berlin Settling-In Model). We want to give the children support and security, be present and tangible. However, we also make sure that we give them the necessary freedom and do not restrict them. As pedagogical professionals, we accept each child as he or she is and accept him or her in his or her individuality. Equality of opportunity and tolerance are practiced in our company. We serve as role models for the children and are always authentic. Our work also consists of not only seeing the individual child, but also perceiving and promoting group processes. An important prerequisite is to involve the parents in our day-to-day work and to offer an educational partnership. The constant mutual exchange helps us to understand the children even better and to respond to them.
Another building block of independent action is free play. It is one of the most important forms of learning for the children and therefore has a high priority in our daycare center. It takes place both indoors and outdoors. Through play, the children learn about their environment, explore it and learn to change it. The pedagogical staff is either "passively" present, observing and accompanying or "actively" going on a journey of discovery together with the children. Cognitive, emotional and motor development is promoted through play. It also stimulates the children's imagination and creativity and trains their problem-solving and conflict management skills. Free play is open and takes place without constraint or direction. The children are free to choose the duration, the place, the opportunity and the play partner. This allows them to pursue their individual interests and needs. Through the joy and pleasure of play alone, the inner motivation to engage with the world arises and grows. Observing free play reveals the children's topics, abilities and learning potential to the pedagogical staff. The professional staff provides the children with sufficient space, materials and time. They can also prepare and design the space and, if necessary, provide stimuli. The children deal with their experiences and reenact everyday situations in role play. They decide independently whether they want to play alone or in a (small) group. In doing so, they can expand their social competence in addition to their ego and factual competence. During free play, the children can independently create places of retreat if they need them. These retreats offer the children space and time to relax.

Rituals provide the child with a sense of security and stability in the large structure of the daycare center. They structure the day and give the children orientation and security. For example, a farewell ritual, such as a hug at the door, can make the separation from parents much easier, or the table saying at the beginning of the midday meal, because repetitive experiences provide security. Rituals can also be extended to the week and the year.
At the Lindwürmer daycare center, various festivals and celebrations take place each year. We welcome spring with our spring café. We sing songs and welcome spring with coffee and cake in our garden. In summer we have our summer party. In a small circle of family and friends and in close cooperation with the parents committee we spend this Saturday together. A large buffet of coffee, cake, drinks and salads is provided by the support of the parents and in the early evening we barbecue together. The children can play different games at different stations. On Fridays after St. Martin's Day, our lantern festival takes place. We meet in front of the daycare center after closing time and light up the campus with our self-made lanterns and many songs. After our walk around the campus, we meet in the garden of the daycare center and end the evening with mulled wine, punch, rolls and sausages. Every year, we also invite our cooperation partners and university employees who support us throughout the year to this celebration. We are happy about every guest who finds his way to us.
We also take other occasions to do something together with the families. We celebrate many other festivals together with the children in the day care center. At Easter, we have breakfast together and then go in search of the well-hidden Easter baskets in the garden, sing songs together and dance to Easter music. Santa Claus also comes to our daycare every year and brings his big sack with him. We play a finger play for him and sing a few songs before he distributes the filled socks to each child. Of course, we also celebrate the children's birthdays. The children also get to decide if they want to do a birthday circle in the morning or at noon. During this ritual, we sing the desired birthday song and play the desired birthday game.

Children are supported in their overall development in our facility, so that a holistic acquisition of competencies can take place in the various areas of upbringing and education. These are in detail:

• Perception (e.g., enabling experiences of the individual senses and sharpening the senses)
• Language (see below)
• Creativity in word, music, and image (e.g., making up stories, musical experiences while singing and handling musical instruments, doing handicrafts, painting, kneading, playing in the sand)
• Promoting gross and fine motor skills (e.g., through movement) (see below)
• Experiences with the environment: nature and technology (e.g. nature experiences/nature heritage, experimenting with water, magnets, sand)
• Mathematics (e.g., building with construction materials, measuring, comparing)
• Experiences with the body (e.g., personal hygiene, applying sunscreen)
• In dealing with media (e.g. looking at picture books, listening to CDs)
• Imparting meaning and values (rules, etc.)
• Cognitive skills (thinking about problems finding solutions to them, stimulating thought processes, etc.).

In the daily get-together, in the togetherness and the communication among each other, the children learn the importance of values and norms and why they are necessary in living together. The children are involved in agreeing on rules and thus learn that rules are made to order the community. However, they also experience that rules are adapted to life and can be changed.

We live in a society with people from different nations, cultures and religions. Our children are growing up increasingly multicultural and have the opportunity to get to know diversity and plurality, to live it and to deal with it in an open dialog. Diversity is about different life situations and world views, all of which we should respect without prejudice. It is about the fundamental recognition of other ways of life, to meet them openly, appreciatively, in order to learn from each other. All people are welcome and bring in their different abilities and talents. Children are strengthened in their individualities and identities and experiences with diversity are made possible as a matter of course. In the process, justice and fairness are also encouraged, and thus active action is taken against injustice and discrimination.
Since each individual is unique and can bring this into the community, we can learn with and for each other. Ultimately, the promotion of development potential, increased language education, a pedagogy of diversity also applies to the topic of inclusion. In this, diversity is lived. Inclusive pedagogy involves focusing on the commonalities of all people. Differences are recognized and considered valuable and important.

In everyday life situations, the children acquire necessary knowledge, skills and abilities. Recurring activities (setting the table, playing games, preparing parties, preparing breakfast, etc.) allow time for deeper insights and provide sufficient space for individual experiences and learning progress. Everyday situations affect the children holistically and provide them with insights into far-reaching connections. Through playful learning and movement, this understanding continues to develop. At the Lindwürmer daycare center, both movement and play are given high priority. The children have the opportunity to pursue their urge to move at any time. "Where free play is possible for children, learning comes alive. Giving space and freedom to play is the basis for meaningful learning processes." Schenker Ina

Play always comes first and is valued by adults as a learning activity.

Movement takes on a very important role in the development of the child. Children express their joy of life, their vitality through movement. The kindergarten period represents a period of lasting motor development. During this time, movement is one of the most important needs of children. With and through movement, physical and mental health is promoted. In addition, there is a comprehensive promotion of cognitive, social, emotional, motor and linguistic development. Versatile movement experiences are thus an elementary prerequisite for holistic development. Through movement and their own actions, children actively acquire diverse knowledge about themselves and their environment.

The movement room and the outdoor area in our day care center enable the children to pursue their need for movement. For this purpose, the children have access to a wide variety of materials that are freely available. The free use of materials stimulates the children's creativity and thus promotes their ability to solve problems independently. Furthermore, children only learn what they can try out for themselves, what they can acquire themselves.

"Tell me and I forget,
show me and I remember,
let me experience and I understand."
Confucius

Through movement experiences, children learn about themselves and their physical abilities. They make important experiences about their body and their person. This represents the basis of their personality development. The more positive the collected image of themselves is, the easier it is for children to face and overcome new and difficult challenges. Our movement room and the outdoor area are stimulating and educational spaces of experience. Through their use, not only the physical and motor development of the children, but also their emotional, social and cognitive development and competence are promoted and trained. By playing movement games together and using the equipment and materials together, children learn to help each other, to show consideration for others, to give in, but also to assert themselves. In this way, they learn about feelings such as joy, exhaustion and anger and develop empathy. Since we want to allow the children to give free rein to their creativity, we also offer open movement activities in addition to planned and guided movement activities. For this purpose, we provide them with "movement building sites". Movement building sites allow for a lot of movement and individual activity, as they are very open in terms of structure and function. Movement building sites challenge the children to overcome self-imposed limits, to get to know new things and to actively explore their environment. The focus is also on collaborative activities.
We as pedagogical staff are supporters and challengers at the same time. This means that we encourage and support the children. We try things out together with the children and thus master challenges and test our limits together with the children. Through consciously set impulses and well thought-out planned offers, the children are provided with a wide variety of opportunities and movement experiences. In this way, holistic development is ensured and the children's original desire to move is preserved.

Children open up the world through language. From the first sound to a complete sentence, we accompany, support and stimulate many different developmental steps in the daycare center. At first, children use non-verbal signals to draw attention to themselves and their needs and thus communicate with their environment. In the further course of development, speech sounds, individual words and first simple sentences follow. Linguistic education grows continuously from infancy to adulthood.
Through language, children draw attention to themselves, their needs, interests, desires and feelings, interact with each other, enter into relationships and shape them. In addition, language is used for the pure exchange of information.
Language plays an important role in the development of the child. The personality is formed and the holistic development is promoted. As a permanent and central theme during the entire daycare time, it is necessary to enable the learning of language with all senses (word "melon": touching a melon, looking at it, smelling it, eating it) and the learning of language in meaningful contexts (word "cow": farm, milk, animal, pasture, patch).
In the day-to-day life of the daycare center, there are many ways to support language education:

• Everyday integrated language promotion: rhymes, finger games, songs, picture book reflections, reading aloud rounds, etc.
• Listening to children, turning to them, maintaining eye contact, paying attention to them
• Taking children seriously in their expressions and letting them speak out
• Everyday linguistic accompaniment and description of one's own and the children's actions and doings.
• Be a language role model (among other things, clearly and whole sentences)
• Creating opportunities for speech (including engaging in conversations, exchanges)
• Corrective feedback (correct repetition without pointing out mistakes, e.g. child: "the strawberry is red" - adult: "That's right, the strawberry is red")
• Authentic adult demeanor: Meaning what you say.

We give conscious consideration and appreciation to children who grow up multilingual. We give them sufficient time in the daycare center to get to know and learn our language. We provide them with a variety of materials for this purpose.

We attach great importance to a healthy, balanced and child-friendly diet. A trained cook, with various advanced training in child-friendly nutrition, prepares a fresh, healthy lunch every day from seasonal, regional and organic products. Breakfast and afternoon snacks are also provided by the daycare center. The meal situations are accompanied by our specialized staff pedagogically and linguistically, so that the topic "healthy nutrition" is firmly represented in our daily routine. A balanced diet, good physical fitness, and the ability to cope with unpleasant situations are important protective factors for growing up healthy.

"The meaning of sustainability refers to the fact that all people should act and think in such a way that all living beings on earth can live well and that the earth is still worth living on in the future. This means that we should treat the earth's treasures, air, water, soil with care."
(Source: Federal Agency for Nature Conservation)

Based on this statement, we would like to introduce and clarify the topic of sustainability to the children in everyday situations. Our goal is for all children to develop a sense of what sustainability means; to create an awareness that they can positively influence their environment and take responsibility for it. To this end, we use situations such as food preparation or waste separation, excursions and walks. In addition, we develop and pursue projects together with the children that clarify the topic of "sustainability" for the children and make it tangible.

Analog and increasingly digital media are a major part of children's lives today. It is therefore necessary to develop and strengthen children's media skills in the daycare center by using digital media in a pedagogically sensible way. The competent and responsible use of media must be learned in the same way as behavior in traffic. We do this by offering children a variety of ways to use and shape media, by critically examining media content together with the children, and by using media as a means of entertainment, research, and information.

Data protection
Data protection at Kita Lindwürmer serves to protect the personal rights of the child. If consent for data use is required, parents must decide in the interest of their children whether or not to give such consent. As a rule, photos are used for the children's portfolios and notices within the daycare center. We also require a written declaration of consent for this.

A special characteristic of the portfolio is the individual view of each child. The portfolio is a free form of documentation and allows for the inclusion of elements appropriate for each individual child. Individual development paths, interests and topics are recorded without comparing the child with other children. Professionals design the portfolio and thus give parents a transparent view inside. The portfolio should create an occasion for dialogue between children and professionals, professionals and parents, and parents and children. The participation of the children in their personal portfolio enables them to contribute their individual "handwriting", for example by painting, drawing or writing. In addition, they are encouraged to look again at their previously documented development paths, preferences and inclinations and to consciously reflect on them.

Learning stories can make a learning process conscious. Learning steps are observed and documented that show how the child has learned something. This makes the
conditions for learning processes are made clear to the child as well as to the professional and the parents. Learning stories should encourage children and adults to reflect on learning.

Development discussions take place regularly (shortly after the individual child's birthday) in the daycare center. These offer the possibility of exchange between pedagogical staff and parents about the child's development and state of development. In an open and trusting discussion atmosphere and in a quiet setting, we exchange observations and jointly agree on goals regarding the child's development. We attach great importance to making these very individual conversations resource-oriented and thus focus on the strengths and potentials of the individual children. To support this, we also use the children's portfolio folder, which underlines and highlights the educational and learning documentation.

Educational partnership includes a shared responsibility and a cooperative partnership between parents and pedagogical staff with regard to the upbringing, education and care of a child, as well as the joint accompaniment and shaping of the child's development processes. Communication and dialogue are fundamental to this partnership.
Cooperation with parents, as the most important caregivers and experts for their children, is the foundation of our pedagogical work. We see them as equal partners and consider the well-being of the child as a common and highest goal. Together with the parents, we experience an open and regular exchange in door-to-door and developmental discussions in order to harmonize individual experiences and pedagogical expertise. Our relationship is characterized by great trust, acceptance and appreciation. Successful cooperation with parents requires mutual transparency and a regular flow of information. On the part of the daycare center, this is made visible through the following insights into the pedagogical work: notices, group diaries, information bulletin boards, letters to parents and parents' evenings. Additional themed parents' evenings offer the opportunity to discuss and exchange ideas on current pedagogically relevant topics.
With all of these prerequisites, we create a basis for jointly reflecting on and implementing praise, criticism and suggestions for change.
We see our facility as an open house and welcome the participation of parents in the daycare's activities. We are also happy when parents contribute their individual skills, ideas and wishes (e.g. baking together, suggestions for excursions, handicrafts and design, etc.). The parents' committee, which acts as the parents' representative body, is involved in all important decisions (changes to the concept, major purchases, closing times, etc.) and supports our pedagogical work, for example, by organizing festivals and celebrations.

This cooperation with the senior citizens' home is intended to be a bridge to build understanding between the generations. Through the created spaces of experience, the different worlds of life can meet, which enriches the lives and everyday life of both the seniors and the children. Through regular handicrafts, posters, songs we stay in contact with the senior home at the moment. We would like to visit the retirement home regularly and the seniors will come to visit us in the Kita Lindwürmer. Actions and offers are planned, prepared, carried out and reflected by the pedagogical staff of both institutions.

The future school starters visit a school in their vicinity together to get a taste of the everyday life of school children.

As part of its public relations work, the daycare center is represented at the annual "University Day". It organizes the sale of coffee and cake and draws attention to the Studierendenwerk daycare center.

The daycare center cooperates with dentists to practice brushing teeth with the children, as well as to provide information about healthy nutrition basics.