The graduation thesis entitled Folklore activity in the preschool period is a theoretical-empirical work with which we wanted to deepen the knowledge of the Slovenian folk tradition and present it to children in the preschool period.
In the theoretical part, we presented the folklore or folk dance and described dances and the costumes of individual Slovenian regions. We studied the children's folklore, researched some of the merry-making games, and described the importance of incorporating folk dancing into the preschool period. We also touched the arrangements of adult dances for children and described some of the dances that have already been arranged.
In the empirical part, we wanted to find out to what extent preschool children know folklore content and bring it closer to them in suitable ways. For this purpose, we asked ourselves the following research questions:
• How familiar are children with folklore activities in Slovenia – what is folklore?
• In what ways to present children with folklore dances, costumes, merry-making games, typical for certain regions?
• How do children response to the discussed topic?
We performed the activities with children, aged 4-5 years, and found that children like to perform activities, connected with the cultural tradition. It is important that educators and adults present folklore content to them in a funny and relaxing way, since this attracts them much more than traditional learning of our history. At first, children were not familiar with the word folklore, but during the activities, we found that they already know a few merry-making games and are briefly familiar with the folk tradition. After the performance of folklore activities in the kindergarten, the children learned the word folklore and expanded their knowledge. They learned about folk dances, national costumes of individual Slovenian regions, sang folk songs and accompanied them with home-made musical instruments. They observed the performance of joint folklore groups and finally drew their impressions on paper and talked about them to other.
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