Efforts of pre-school education teachers in performing musical activities and determination of educational requirements

Pre-school educational institutions can only achieve their aims through educationprograms prepared and implemented efficiently. In this context, planning andimplementing daily activities efficiently as a tool to achieve the aims included anddetermined within pre-school educational programs are very important.One of the activities to help achieving fundamental aims of pre-school educationalprograms is "musical activities". Musical activities having an important role in groupactivities of daily activity program is a kind of activity contributing to sophisticateddevelopment of children. Musical activities are such kind of activity which can ensurepre-school educational program to achieve its aims successfully if utilized correctly andefficiently. For this reason, pre-school teachers are expected to turn musical activities togood purpose in such a way to support development areas of pre-school children.Pre-school teachers can only turn musical activities to good purpose through their ownefficiency in musical activities. And their efficiency can only be improved bydetermining their educational requirements related with musical activities. This researchaims to determine situation of pre-school teachers in performing musical activities andtheir educational requirements.The research is in the form of scanning and was conducted in kindergartens in scope ofelementary schools dependent of the Ministry of Education in Şanlıurfa city center andon teachers functioning in state kindergartens during 2005-2006-education term. 25 pre-school teachers were interviewed during the research.Research data were collected through semi-structuring interview technique as one of thequalitative research methods in order to deeply determine viewpoints of teachers.Descriptive analysis technique was used while analyzing the data and obtained findingswere presented quantitatively.According to findings obtained as a result of the research, nearly all teachers thinks thatmusical activities are important in the program but cannot be performed efficiently.Moreover, it was determined that the teachers have educational requirementsconcerning basic music knowledge, model activity application, skill of playing aninstrument, utilization of music with drama, methods and techniques used in musicalactivities, improvement of musical knowledge and pre-school music types, classmanagement, utilization of musical activities with other activities, personal and creativemusical activities, utilization of musical activities as an observation tool.