How to turn Finnish-inspired playful learning into everyday practice?

Finnish education has become well known worldwide. Preschool owners hear about playful learning, child-centred pedagogy, highly competent teachers, holistic development and giving children time to explore, experiment and discover. Naturally, this creates interest.

🤔 Could we bring some of these practices into our preschool?

But it can also create a misconception. You may think that adopting Finnish best practices means replacing your existing curriculum, changing your preschool concept, or even becoming a Finnish-branded preschool.

It doesn't have to. There is another way.

🎯 You can keep the preschool you have already built—your brand, your identity, your local curriculum, your teachers and your relationship with parents—and transform the way learning happens inside it.

That is the approach we believe in at Kindiedays.

In Finland, children spend a lot of time outdoors from their earliest years. They play in forests, parks, and playgrounds in all seasons; explore mud and snow; climb over rocks and roots; collect sticks and pinecones; and observe the changing natural world around them.

These experiences are enjoyable for children, but research increasingly suggests that regular contact with nature can also play an important role in children's health, wellbeing, development and learning.

A research-based guide published in 2026 by South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences (Xamk) brings together research on the health and wellbeing benefits of nature during pregnancy and the first years of a child's life. Its message is simple: contact with nature should be part of children's everyday lives.

Nature supports children's developing immune system

One particularly fascinating area of research concerns the relationship between nature and the developing immune system.

The first years of life are an important period for immune development. At the same time, children's microbiota – the communities of microorganisms living on and inside the body – are developing.

Contact with diverse natural environments exposes children to microbes found in soil, plants and other natural materials. According to the research presented in the Xamk guide, this microbial diversity can contribute to the development of the microbiota of the skin, gut and respiratory tract and support the balanced development of the immune system.

This means that actually interacting with nature matters – touching soil, grass, plants and other natural materials rather than simply looking at nature. For young children, this comes naturally. They want to dig in the soil, pick up stones, examine leaves, crawl on grass and investigate everything they find. Perhaps getting a little dirty is not such a bad thing after all.

Nature supports attention and executive functions

Nature can support the developing brain, too.

Kindiedays Academy is an interactive online training program for private preschools that combines the best elements of Finnish and your local early education curriculum. 

Why Kindiedays Academy?

Preschools today face increasing competition. Parents want high-quality early childhood education that sets a strong foundation for their children. However, delivering the quality education that parents expect becomes difficult without a well-structured curriculum and motivated teachers.

Program Details

🎓 10 interactive online workshops
🕓  2,5 hours
📆 September 24th to December 10th
💫 €150 / INR 15,000 / VND 4.600.000

All participants will receive a diploma upon completion of the Kindiedays Academy.

Download the complete syllabus here!

Education Specialist Stella Giota leads the Kindiedays Academy.

Watch Stella's video greetings!

Learn more and sign up here ▶️

Customer feedback

What Finnish evidence reveals about attendance information—and how a clearer shared picture can support ECEC planning anywhere.

Evidence reported in June 2026 by a major Finnish municipality.

A universal operational challenge

Plans change. A child becomes ill, a family holiday moves or a parent’s work schedule changes. A childcare place may remain reserved even though it is no longer needed.

For an individual family, this is a normal change in everyday life. Across a large early childhood centre, childcare group or public ECEC system, however, the difference between expected and actual attendance can affect staffing, meal preparation, cleaning and the use of facilities.

The challenge is not that families deliberately create waste. It is that updated information does not always reach every person and system involved in planning in time.

Evidence from Finland

Recent Finnish evidence illustrates how large this information gap can become.

In June 2026, Yle reported that one major municipality recorded more than 23,000 unreported summer absence days and estimated approximately €1.2 million in additional operating costs. Staffing holidays, meals and cleaning services had been arranged using the attendance information families had previously provided.

Other Finnish municipalities have also reported substantial differences between reserved and actual attendance during holiday periods. In one municipality, reported costs connected with uncancelled reservations fell by €178,000 year on year after clearer cancellation rules and extensive family communication were introduced together. Because both measures changed at the same time, the result cannot be attributed to one intervention alone.

These examples concern holiday-period operations in Finland rather than everyday attendance throughout the year. Their wider lesson is nevertheless relevant internationally: planning becomes more difficult when expected attendance and actual care needs diverge.

Sources: Yle, 29 June 2026 and 4 September 2025  https://yle.fi/a/74-20233529  |  https://yle.fi/a/74-20180922

Where do the avoidable costs come from?

1. Staffing and substitute planning

Separate staffing and attendance records make it hard to reconcile changing care needs.

ECEC providers must maintain sufficient staffing for the children who attend. Work shifts, leave and substitute requirements therefore depend on expected attendance. If absence updates remain in separate messages, paper records or disconnected systems, leaders may have to make staffing decisions using information that is already incomplete.

In Finland, the Association of Finnish Cities and Municipalities has reported that incomplete absence information led some centres to arrange substitutes who were ultimately not required because not all expected children attended.

Source: Association of Finnish Cities and Municipalities, 29 January 2025  https://www.kuntaliitto.fi/tiedotteet/2025/varhaiskasvatuksen-jarjestamiskustannukset-ovat-nousseet-merkittavasti

2. Meals and food waste

More accurate attendance numbers can support meal ordering and preparation.

Meals are ordered or prepared before the final attendance number is known. Research from the Natural Resources Institute Finland found that food waste in the measured daycare centres amounted to 20–30% of prepared food; a related monitoring project measured approximately 27%. Most was serving waste connected with overproduction or over-ordering. Uncertainty about the number of attending children was identified as one reason food is prepared with a safety margin.

This does not mean that all ECEC food waste is caused by unreported absences. Menu design, portion forecasting and normal variation in children’s appetites also matter. Better attendance information can nevertheless support more accurate meal planning.

Source: Natural Resources Institute Finland, Lahti & Silvennoinen, 2020  https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-326-904-0

3. Facilities, services and quieter operating periods

Päiväkoti Silkkiuikku, a quiet early childhood centre during a low-attendance period.

When expected attendance is known early enough, providers can decide which rooms, groups or locations need to operate, align staff leave with quieter periods and order cleaning or other services for the facilities that will actually be used. Reservations that remain in the system “just in case” reduce that opportunity.

Make changing care needs easier to communicate

Attendance reporting needs to be simple for families and connected to the tools educators already use. Families need a straightforward way to add expected drop-off and pick-up times, record one-day or longer absences and update information when plans change.

Educators need a clear daily and forward-looking view without searching through separate messages. Centre leaders and managers need current attendance information and exportable reports to support staffing, catering and operational decisions.

How Kindiedays creates a shared attendance picture

Kindiedays connects attendance information from the Family App to the Educator App and manager reports. Families can add future attendance times and record absences with a reason and optional details. Educators can see expected absences, view planned drop-off and pick-up times, and check future calendar dates. Managers can review and export attendance information for operational planning.

No digital tool can guarantee savings, and attendance information is only one part of workforce, meal, and facility planning. Kindiedays provides a clearer shared information flow so decisions can be based on the most current information available.

Kindiedays connects attendance information from families to educators to managers in one shared workflow.

From attendance information to operational decisions

A shared attendance picture can support more reliable workforce forecasts, better-informed substitute planning, more accurate meal quantities, and earlier decisions about rooms, groups, or operating locations. Managers can use exportable reports to examine patterns and support future planning.

More than attendance management

Attendance is one part of the wider Kindiedays platform. The same connected solution also supports pedagogical planning and documentation, learning observations and reports, everyday routine reporting, and communication between educators and families. Centres can manage operational information and each child’s learning journey within one shared digital environment.

See how Kindiedays supports clearer attendance planning
Connect families, educators and managers in one shared flow.

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Last week, we started exploring what true experiential lesson plans look like in practice through the Kindiedays theme All About Me.

This week, we continue our journey with a completely different—but equally exciting—theme:

ANIMALS 🦋🐘🐶

Animals are naturally fascinating to children. They fly, swim, crawl, jump, and run. Some are tiny enough to sit on a flower, while others are bigger than a house. Some live with us, while others live in forests, oceans, deserts or jungles far away.

This natural curiosity makes Animals an ideal theme for experiential learning.

But experiential learning is not simply about choosing a fun animal activity.

For quality early childhood education, activities need to be purposeful, goal-oriented and connected to children's holistic development.

Kindiedays brings educational methods inspired by the Finnish curriculum into vibrant, interactive Lesson Plans that combine clear learning objectives with practical, hands-on classroom experiences.

One theme – many opportunities for learning

Theme-based learning helps children connect different areas of knowledge instead of experiencing them as separate subjects.

With the Animals theme, children can explore questions such as:

• How do animals grow?
• Where do different animals live?
• How do animals move?
• What sounds do they make?
• What do they eat?
• How are animals different from each other?
• How should we care for animals and nature?

Learning can happen through stories, discussions, movement, art, music, observation, investigation, and play. Children are not simply told facts about animals.

They experience, explore, create, move, communicate and discover.

That is the essence of experiential learning.