Movement is essential for a child's holistic development from birth. Dance, as a form of movement, enables experiencing, exploring, and learning, while creative movement connects verbal, visual, and physical learning methods, allowing children to acquire knowledge in a relaxed and experiential manner.
Traffic education is a key area, as it contributes to children's safety. It prepares children from an early age for responsible and safe behaviour in traffic. Traffic education activities are often conducted through games, visual materials, and discussions. As movement is a primary need for children, I incorporated the creative movement method into the planned activities.
In my diploma thesis, I explored how creative movement can be used in teaching traffic education and understanding traffic more broadly. In the theoretical section, I defined the art of dance and its related objectives in the Curriculum for Kindergartens (2025), and presented dance education, its methods, and forms of work. I also summarised findings on dance, dance ability, and the intermediate model, as these are important for understanding the subsequent theory. I focused on the definition of creative movement and its impact on the child, which are the main guidelines in my work. The connection between movement and learning is very important, so I also included experiential learning and the effects of movement. Through the creative movement method, we develop creative thinking and physical-motor intelligence. I then summarised the second part of the theoretical work, which concerns traffic education. In this section, I included the area of society, defined traffic education, described the Pasavček project, and summarised guidelines for professionals involved in traffic education. Finally, I connected both parts of the theoretical work and justified their complementarity.
In the empirical part, I presented activities that I had practically implemented, incorporating creative movement and traffic-related content. I conducted these activities with a group of children aged 4 to 6 years. Through this practical component, I aimed to determine how children would respond to traffic education when presented through creative movement. I also sought to assess whether creative movement aids in the acquisition of road traffic knowledge and its motivational impact. The analysis results indicated that creative movement positively influences the acquisition of traffic content, stimulates children's imagination, cooperation, and expression, and thereby increases their motivation. The children participated enthusiastically, contributed many ideas, and put them into practice. They interacted and cooperated with one another, which contributed to the relaxed and successful outcome of the project.
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