Social skills are abilities needed by each person in different stages of life to facilitate interpersonal interactions with other people in verbal or non-verbal way. Without these skills, children cannot function in social relationship with peers and adults, learn from them and with them, cope with life tasks and responsibilities and be part of own social environment.
Limitations in the area of social skills and adaptive behaviour in addition to intellectual functioning and other adaptive behaviours is central characteristic in the definition of intellectual disabilities. Difficulties in establishing and maintaining social relationship for children with intellectual disabilities (CID) among others happen due to slower integrated development.
Music can be the medium by which CID develop social skills that allows them to collaborate with other people and because of difficulties in cognitive, social and emotional areas, through active participation in music activities are also encouraged to express pleasurable feelings.
Numerous studies point out that you can use music to improve social skills and expressing pleasant feelings of joy and pleasure. This is primarily for music activities that include singing, listening to music, playing musical instruments and rhythm imitation. Such activities promote CID to cooperate and allow interesting learning of social skills, useful and helpful for further social situations. The available studies have mainly focused on the assessment of the influence of musical activities in the area of social skills with children with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities, but less with severe and profound. In this thesis, we investigate effect of promoting social skills, musical and emotional expression through the implementation of various musical activities, including the implementation of playing musical instruments and singing, listening, creativity, musical-educational games, bibarije and musical stories. The program was based on 15 music workshops, which is actively involved group of children with severe and profound intellectual disabilities (CSPID) however, in multiple case study we included two CSPID. With review of professional documentations, we learn about the characteristics of children social, emotional, cognitive and motor area and were helpful to design the program of music workshop adapted to their abilities, interests and needs. The effects of the musical expression were determined by descriptive analysis of the achieved goals of individual workshop. The effect of the workshop on the promotion of social skills were assessed using descriptive analysis skills after each workshop and the interviews of special and rehabilitation pedagogue before and after the completion of the implementation of music workshop, which we wanted to determine progress in the field of children's social skills. Expression of pleasant emotions we observed with observation scheme authors H. Smrtnik Vitulić and S. Prosen.
The obtained data from the above sources, we come up with results that music activities have a positive impact on the social skills of cooperation, greeting, establishing eye and physical contact and following the rules in the group setting, to express feelings of joy and pleasure by participating in group music activities and musical expression with both CSPID. Presented and tested musical activities in this thesis can assist and represent guidelines for the planning and using of musical activities for developing social skills, expression of pleasant emotions and musical expression in CSPID in participation with group of peers.
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