Evaluation of the primary school first grade orientation and preparation curriculum according to teachers views

By lowering the age of starting primary school to five, in order to facilitate compliance of children starting school at a young age, Compliance and Preparatory Studies for Program of first Grade were included. It is foreseen that this process -containing the activities of all the lessons of the first grades program of Primary school- to continue for 3 months, following the beginning of first term. Evaluating this studies will help determine whether the activities are appropriate for their purposes and to what extent they prepare children to school. Knowing what teachers, who are the practitioners of the program, living through the process of practice; is one of the most important elements for determination of the effectiveness of the program. Thus, the problems can be revealed and a number of measures to prevent them can be taken. Knowing the positive sides and disruptions of the program will be guide for regulations that are made. The purpose of this study is evaluating the Primary School first grade compliance and preparation program according to opinions of the teachers. For this purpose, benefited from the mixed method, qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques are used together. In the quantitative part of the search, questionnaire was conducted to 307 teachers who are working at primary schools in province and district centers of Aydın. In the qualitative part of the search, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 teachers working at primary schools that located in central district of Aydın. According to the findings obtained from the quantitative data, it is emerged that teachers have favorable opinion about attainment, content, teaching and learning process and evaluation scale of the compliance and preparation program. In addition, it is occured that a great majority of the views of the teachers about the elements of the program do not differ significantly by gender of teachers and the grade level they teach. According to the findings obtained from the qualitative data, it is occured that a large part of teachers do not have sufficient information before starting practice the program, they state the aim of the program as adapting and preparing the children to school, they find the time is long, physical conditions and materials insufficient, applicability is low. And also it is observed that teachers have problems because of students' age, duration, physical conditions and family. Suggestions in order to overcome the problems that teachers experience; regulating the physical conditions, separation of the classes by age groups, decreasing the duration of the program, taking the views of the teachers. KEYWORDS Primary school first grade, orientation and preparation, teachers view, curriculum evaluation