A preschool teacher plays an important role in promoting the speech and language development of preschool children. Children spend most of their waking hours in kindergarten, therefore it is precisely the educators who must set a good speech and language example for the child and provide him with quality activities that will help him develop his speech, language and thinking. The educator in preschool creates a pleasant climate and plans activities that enable the use of speech, language, dialogue and listening and create positive mutual relationships. In the thesis, we focus on the speech and language development of children; internal and external factors that affect children's speech and language development; what does the curriculum for kindergartens say about children's speech and language development and what is the role of a preschool teacher in promoting children's speech development in kindergarten. In the diploma work, the emphasis is on encouraging the development of speech with the help of books and joint reading. The aim of the thesis is to find out how preschool teachers encourage children's speech and language development and how children respond to the story with exercises to encourage the saying that I wrote for the purpose of the thesis and what do preschool teachers think about the use of the story for the purpose of encouraging speech. In the empirical part, we present the results of the research, which we conducted in the kindergarten with the help of questionnaires and interviews. The thesis consists of theoretical and empirical work. In the theoretical part, we focus on the language and speech development of children between the ages of four and six. At first, we describe what speech is and what language is, the characteristics of a child's speech and describe the factors of speech development. In the following, we describe how speech develops and how speech and language development is encouraged in kindergarten. We list different definitions of exercises to promote speech and language development and touch on the importance of reading and telling stories to children. In the empirical part of the diploma work, we investigated how children respond to the story Manja na smučišču, which contains exercises to encourage speech. We also investigated how educators promote speech and language development in kindergarten, what activities they do with children and how important they think it is to promote speech and language development in kindergarten. We found out that educators are aware of the importance of promoting speech and language, as the preschool period is an intensive period of speech and language development. Educators consider themselves competent to promote children's speech and language development. They carry out exercises with the children in their daily routine to promote the development of speech and language by encouraging conversation, speaking, listening, observing and describing, visiting the library and puppet shows, and through activities such as finding rhymes and counting books, kamishibai theater, playing roles and other exercises. Children responded well to the story Manja na smučišču, they were active listeners. During the telling of the story, they were active listeners. They got involved in the story, performed exercises to stimulate the saying and expressed themselves through movement. We have concluded that the story containing exercises to encourage pronunciation helps children to relax and at the same time consolidate and develop their speech and language competences.
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