Fairy tales are indispensable part of every childhood. They enable children to travel into the world, that is real for them and encourage their progress in various areas of development – with their help they grow emotionally, morally, intellectually ad socially. Today we live in a world in which we are constantly surrounded by the media, which means, that we devote less and less of our time to quality fairy tales and reading. Considering the fact that the influence of fairy tales and reading on children’s development is irreplaceable, it is particularly important to encourage the development of reading motivation, and of course the reading itself. The development of reading ability and literacy is a prerequisite for success at school and later in life. It is essential, that all people who raise children, that is, primarily parents and teachers, care for their reading and media education.
In the theoretical part of the Master’s Thesis, we defined fairy tales, their significance and influence on a child. Reading, reading development, the importance of reading for a child, reading motivation and the child’s way of creating imaginative images are presented. We have defined works of literature that are suitable for children; we also described literary adaptations, translations and picture books. We presented the media, their dominance, negative sides and media education.
Our research purpose was to find out the impact of fairy tales in various forms on the development of children’s imagination – a fairy tale in a book form, a fairy tale in the form of a cartoon and fairy tale in the form of a picture book. We were also interested in attitude that children have to fairy tales, reading and cartoons and whether parents are concerned about the reading and media education of their children. The empirical part presents results obtained by comparing pupil’s illustrations. The data obtained from the questionnaires was processed in the SPSS program for statistical analysis. The research is based on illustrations and answers from 59 pupils of the 2nd grades of primary school Mirana Jarca in Ljubljana.
We came to the conclusion that fairy tales in a book form have the greatest possible impact on stimulating the development of pupil’s imagination. Both, picture book and a cartoon inhibit pupils to form their own imaginative images. The analysis has shown that pupils love both, fairy tales and cartoons, but the proportion of those who prefer fairy tales is slightly higher. The analysis also showed that parents do not strive enough for reading and media education of their children.
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