The objective of this study is to develop the contents of post-reading activities, which are utilizable, concrete and actual for young children's education. The post-reading activities, by utilizing young children's stories, aim to enhance the creativ...
The objective of this study is to develop the contents of post-reading activities, which are utilizable, concrete and actual for young children's education. The post-reading activities, by utilizing young children's stories, aim to enhance the creativity of young children, and its lower fields which are fluency, uniqueness, flexibility, and the imaginative ability.
This study began first with understanding the young children's book reading environment in the young children's organizations and the recognition of teachers for young children on young children's creativeness by sending questionnaires for 100 teachers for young children. As a result indicated in questionnaires, 55% and 43.2% of young children liked very much and generally reading the books for them during the large group activity time, respectively. Furthermore, as the teachers for young children believed that such a book reading activity gives a great help for the enhancement of creativeness, it was understood that book reading in the large group activity is very positive.
And, as post-reading activities related to books before and after book reading, 69.8% of teachers for young children asked always or often questions, 97.2% had not neglected their endeavors to enhance the creativeness of young children through open-ended questions, and it was indicated that 55.3% and 25.3% had been processing talking activities and art activities for their major post-reading activities, respectively. 80.7% of the teachers answered that the post-reading activity through book reading is very much effective or effective, and 80.9% answered that they would positively utilize the program for post-reading activity, if it had been given. This revealed that concrete and diversified programs for post-reading activity are necessary.
Based on such current status in the education of young children, an actual program for post-reading activities is developed as below. The target was 18 young children's stories created by the researcher, which had been evaluated as contributing toward the creativity enhancement. As these stories with fable type, where each characteristic hero animal appears, were written based on ecology of each animal and included the element which could be clues for questions, it seems to be effective to attract the creative and philosophical thinking.
The program for post-reading activities were applied actually to 25 children in the age of five who were selected from the H nursery located at Incheon city, and conducted over nine weeks, twice per week, in the way that one book for young children was read and post-reading activity was carried out. About 40 to 50 minutes were allocated to each activity.
Detailed contents of post-reading activity consisted in the order of aims of post-reading activity, prior knowledge and experience to be equipped with before the commencement of this activity, method of activity, anticipated behavior and countermeasure of young children and enlargement of the activity. And the method of activity began from a close-ended question which was simply asking whether the contents of young children's story had been understood and processed to open-ended question and which could lead to diverse answers or behaviors based on the contents of young children's story. This open-ended question or activity was carried out in the combined and/or parallel type of divergent question which requires more imaginative and creative thinking, and evaluative question, which can be a philosophical base of value judgment. Furthermore, in addition to them, this post-reading activity includes various contents such as reconstruction, arts activity, music activity and body language, so on.
The post-reading activity was surveyed by verifying the variation in the results of before and after activities, and as a result after conducting this post-reading activity, while the average point of creativeness before activity was 45.88, the average point of creativeness after activity was 53.1, which was increased by 8.71. And for lower elements of the creativity, the fluency was improved by 8.71 from 45.83 to 54.54, the uniqueness by 6.29 from 46.54 to 52.83, the flexibility by 6.63 from 44.54 to 51.17, and the imaginative power by 7.33 from 50.25 to 57.58, and it could be found that this post-reading activity played a certain role in the enhancement of creativity.
As the result of this study as presented above indicates that post-reading activities utilizing young children's stories are effective in enhancing the creativity of young children, and the contents of activity can be applied to the actual educational practice, the post-reading activity programs are expected to be utilized in the actual educational practice for young children.