preschool education

Creative dance as a tool for developing preschoolers’ communicative skills and movement expression

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Communication among children as a social skill is a basic goal in preschool education and creative dance, as an expressive, aesthetic, non-verbal language, can be one of the tools to achieve that. The aim of this study was to investigate the suitability of a creative dance program, focusing on the development of communicative relations among children and their movement expressivity. An interventional program of creative dance was designed and implemented in an average kindergarten for eight weeks, aiming a) at the development of communicative relations, represented as cooperation, responsibility, initiative and activity for common entertainment and b) at movement expressivity, represented as body expression, expressive use of materials and expressing a concept. An observation protocol and a rubric were designed to evaluate children’s performance at the beginning and at the end of the intervention. Forty-nine preschoolers participated, divided into two groups: experimental (n=25) and control (n=24). One-way repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted to compare separately communication relations and expressivity before and after the intervention (Time1, Time 2) and between groups. Concerning both communication relations and expressivity, there was a significant interaction effect between time and group (p<.001), which is evidence for the effectiveness of the program. Nevertheless, further research on a larger sample is needed.

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Psychomotor Education in Preschool Years: An Experimental Research

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The purpose of this study is to present the results arrived at as a result of the implementation and evaluation of an experimental program of psychomotor education for preschool children. The research sample was 116 children aged 58 – 69 months old (M = 62.72, SD =3.41) who were attending public preschool classes in Iraklio and Rethymno during the school year 2001 – 2002. The children were split in two groups (experimental and control group). The research process was comprised by three phases: psychomotor skills testing at the beginning of the year, implementation of the psychomotor program in the experimental group (for 12 consecutive weeks), and further psychomotor testing which evaluated the effectiveness of the program. Data collection was carried through the ‘checklist of psychomotor ability’ which we have constructed ourselves. The research results showed that the experimental program of psychomotor education, which was followed for the experimental group, resulted in the improvement of psychomotor skills assessed by the checklist (those were body concepts and skills, space concepts, and time concepts) in comparison with the control group which followed a typical preschool class schedule. The overall progress of the experimental group was statistically significant (t = 9.441, df = 114, p < .001). The findings of this research showed that psychomotor education can play a decisive role in the development of fundamental concepts such as body, space, time which are also fundamental for cross thematic and interdisciplinary teaching in the preschool class.

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