Abstract:

Sense education is defined as the process enabling a person to use his body actively in his surrounding while gathering information through senses, determining which sense will be used or which part of the body will be benefitted suitably, depending on neurological processes, supporting children to learn through sense materials and activities and including meaningful educational strategies. It is necessary to use most of the senses in daily life for every activity. Children learn everything by perceiving through their senses. In order that learning in children is realized, all the senses perform their tasks, transmit information to the brain and the information transmitted is made meaningful by perception and then commented. In that way, it makes a comment on the flow of sophisticated information coming from senses and creates perceptive lives using the knowledge of sense. These perceptive lives give a support to the development of creative thinking skills at children by providing them produce new thoughts and putting ideas forward, proposing hypotheses, using their dream powers and seeking alternative innovative outcomes. Creative thinking is the skill for coming up with new products by benefitting from the accumulation of information and experience as a result of synthesizing, and it is included in any kind of works and tasks in affective and intellectual activities. Therefore, it is primarily of great importance in educating the senses of children in order to improve their creative thinking skills. In that way, problem solving skill of children, their imaginary world and skill of being able to think multi-directionally will be improved, their size of vocabulary knowledge will increase; they will be able to express their feelings and thoughts in different ways and make a cause and effect connection between different disciplines like art, music, drama, literature, science etc. The current study was carried out to determine the effect of sense education program on the creative skills of children at the age of 61-66 months attending to a kindergarten. The working group of the research was made up of test (n:25) and control (n:27) groups, 52 children in total, having had no special sense education program and attending to independent kindergartens acting under Ministry of Education in the city of Ankara, in the educational year of 2012-2013. In order to investigate the effect of Sense Education Program on the creative thinking skills of children at the age of 61-66 months in the research, an experimental design with pretest posttest control groups. In the research, General Information Form was used in order to gather data with regard to children and their families and The Test for Creative Thinking- Drawing Production (TCT-DP) that was developed by Urban and Jellen (1996) and of which reliability and validity studies were carried out by Can-Yaşar (2009) in order to apply over Turkish children under six was used so as to evaluate creative thinking skills of children. The test group was applied Sense Education Program developed by Yazıcı (2013) for about eight weeks in five working day of the week for 40 minutes 1 hour. As for the control group, the program of Ministry of Education was applied by the teachers. At the end of the statistical analysis of the data, it was found that the sense education program applied had an effect in favor of test group in the mean score with regard to creative thinking skills of children both in the test and control groups.

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