The goal of the present MA thesis is to establish whether folk tradition, an important segment of preschool education, can in fact help us find out and develop children’s preliteracy skills. The author was also interested to find out by means of which method (dancing, storytelling …) folk tradition was most effective in discovering and developing preliteracy skills, which new skills and knowledge children would acquire through such approach, and what would the level of the children’s progress be after intense two-month work involving folk tradition. Since the groups chosen consisted of children of both genders, the author was naturally also interested to see whether there was any substantial difference in the progress of these children based on their gender and different age.
To come to conclusions, the author compared the results on preliteracy skills before and after intense two-month inclusion of folk tradition in every day kindergarten activities. The results were obtained by means of a test that preschool children attending kindergarten Sončni žarek in Stara Loka were asked to take.
The results obtained showed that after two months of intense inclusion of folk tradition in children’s everyday activities, the progress was detected in almost every preliteracy skill. It was also proved that there was a difference in progress between girls and boys, girls made more progress than boys. We were surprised by the results of different ages. In addition to the expected progress in four, five and six year old children, the results of seven years olds were negatively surprised, because they had not shown the progress. The three years old children had positively surprised us, because they have made a great progress in all preliteracy skills. The results also have showed that the children learned many new things about folk tradition.
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