Encouraging creativity of preschool children aged 5 to 6 through play materials is a great challenge for teachers who by daily planning of play activities encourage playing in order to develop creativity. Developing creativity in early childhood education is essential, since the children will need their creative skills later in school to prepare them for a successful future, for example to learn appropriate negotiation skills, to foster relationships and enrich their lives. In order to succeed in developing the creative abilities of children, the teacher needs to be able to recognise and monitor the child's knowledge, abilities, personality traits and play materials. Only thus, the teacher can plan the implementation of activities that contribute most to children's acquisition of new knowledge and creativity. The main principles of preschool child development, symbolic play and play materials, represent the theoretical frame of this thesis, confirming that the knowledge of the child's development is of key importance to fully develop creativity in early childhood education in order to obtain the necessary skills. Children in the age group of 5 to 6 years are characterised by the achievement of the highest level of development of symbolic play regardless of the type of play material. Children are very flexible in shaping play materials. By using structured play materials children create new ideas, which contributes to their learning and development abilities. The use of unstructured materials allows children to be cooperative, adaptable, exploring, and at the same time it stimulates their way of thinking and concentration.
With low-structured materials, it is possible for a child to achieve the highest level of creativity. Therefore, a survey was conducted to find out what kind of play material is used by the teachers of the Litija Kindergarten to develop creativity among children aged 5 to 6 years.
Furthermore, the goal was to find out whether there are differences in children handling either low or highly structured play material as well as what kind of play materials teachers use most often in order to encourage and foster creativity in children at this age.
The analysis of the obtained results proved that the time children spend on using play material and their interest in using low or highly structured play material varies, which means more time and interest is spent on low-structured play material. As a result, teachers most often use low-structured play material to develop a child's creativity at this age, including leaves, blocks and fabric. Unstructured play material offers a lot of potential for creativity, especially when natural materials are used, such as sand, clay and dough. By using the method of qualitative research, it is possible to critically analyse and evaluate the findings concerning the use of play materials from the aspect of stimulating children's creativity. According to the evaluation results, children were most persistent in using unstructured play material, whereby they also had most associations, were most independent and persisted the longest time when creating something from scratch. The obtained results of the analysis as well as of the survey show that the use of unstructured and waste materials enables children to develop their creative mind best.
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