Fairy-tale reading and listening helps with child’s personal, emotional, and moral development and is important for educational work in primary school. Many authors in their works, which are intended for younger readers, use problem topics that encourage creative lessons. Teachers encourage pupils’ empathy and consequently enable good interpersonal relations and better life understanding by using fairy-tales in class. The theoretical part of my master’s thesis includes emotional characteristics of pupils during the first three years of primary school, fairy-tale influence on children’s empathy and its importance for their further development. I present different fairy-tale definitions, fairy-tale classification and theoretical approaches to it in the theoretical part. In the thesis I also focus on interpretative reading of fairy-tales with problem topics and its effect on pupils’ emotional and social development. In the empirical part of my thesis I wanted to find out about socially-emotional characteristics of children and how children’s empathy is influenced by interpretative reading and listening of the following fairy-tales: Deklica brez rok, Sirotica and Te že vidim, te že vidim! whose author is Anja Štefan. To achieve findings, I performed creative lessons based on problem topics and I observed and assessed children. The research included a group of first grade pupils (N = 22), a group of second grade pupils (N = 23), and a group of third grade pupils (N = 29). The creative lessons based on problem topics included different activities, encouraging pupils’ empathy. I also observed their feelings and behaviour during activities. Pupils found the activities interesting, since they were different and demanded more action in class. They were most enthusiastic about the introductory motivations and dramatization. A sad and unusual end during the first part of a fairy-tale caused uncomfortable feelings of pupils. However, after the end of a fairy-tale, they turned into more pleasant feelings. The biggest tolerance and empathy improvement was observed in the third grade. Most pupils improved at showing feelings and empathy. Nevertheless, some pupils would still need more time for an obvious improvement. With this research, we helped to improve the interpretative reading of fairy-tales with problem topics. Consequently, we encouraged empathy of pupils of the first three grades of the primary school.
|
