Abstract:

The leisure time activities are the times when individuals carry out some activities to entertain and relax after having fulfilled some social and personal responsibilities. These time periods constitute a significant part of one's life. Therefore, these individuals should be trained in order to spend accurately and effectively this time and to accurately create a life discipline. The Ministry of National Education is aiming at providing areas of interests to the students through the free activity classes and securing their artistic, social and cultural development thereof. This goal is important in order to create healthy communities in physical and mental aspects. In this study we tried to identify the views of the classroom teachers on the Free Activity classes. The survey is of a screening model and of a descriptive nature. The research sample was composed of total 455 classroom teachers worked in the state schools in the province of Elazig during the 2012-2013 academic year. The questionnaire consists of totally two sections. A two -part questionnaire was prepared after the researchers have scanned the relevant literature and have taken the experts’ opinions. In the first part of this questionnaire there are a total of 4 demographic data, and the opinions items have been compared based on these data. And in the second part of the questionnaire there are a total of 16 opinion items related to the free activity classes. The KMO value of the questionnaire is 0.856; the Bartlett's test was found to as 2187,121. The SPSS statistical software program was utilized in the analysis of the data. The " arithmetic mean ", "percent " and "frequency" were used in the analyzing of the data obtained from the study; the exposure degree of the teachers’ opinions to the variables based on the demographic data have been tested by t test and by a one- way analysis of variance of the independent groups for the items of parametric distributions and a LSD test was performed. And as regard to the items which did not indicate a parametric distribution, Levene and Kruskal Wallis tests were used. The classroom teachers have stated that the free activity classes developed the students’ skills of social life and they had both entertaining and instructive aspects. The classroom teachers who participated to the survey stated that the limited physical school facilities are an obstacle in terms of having these classes be taught more efficiently.

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