The effect of games with music on the development of social skills of primary school 3rd grade students

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of musical play practices on the social skill development of primary school 3rd grade students and the opinions of the classroom teachers of the groups on the effect of musical games on the social skill development of their students. The research design was mixed method and sequential explanatory design, one of the mixed method research designs, was used in this study. The experimental design of the research is "pretest posttest design with non-equivalent control group". The research includes 3rd grade students in a public primary school in Kars in the 2021-2022 academic year. The sample of the study consists of 60 students, 30 of them are in the experimental group and 30 of them are in the control group. In the research, the data were collected by using the "Social Skills Scale" and "Semi-structured Interview Form". In the research, musical game activities were applied to the experimental group for 10 weeks, but these activities were not applied to the control group. At the end of the research, interviews were conducted with both the experimental and control group classroom teachers. Independent groups t-testivariance analysis was applied on the Social Skills Scale scores of the experimental and control groups to solve the quantitative data. In the analysis of the qualitative data, the semi-structured interview questions directed to the experimental and control group classroom teachers were analyzed by content analysis. According to the results of the findings which were obtained from the research; It was found that there was a significant difference in favor of the experimental group between the post-test total scores corrected according to the Social Skills Scale pre-test total score averages of the students in the experimental and control groups. According to the answers given by the classroom teachers to the interview questions, it was concluded that games with music would be beneficial for the development of social skills. The findings were discussed in consideration of the literature, and suggestions were made for future research. Keywords: Primary, 3rd Grade, social skills, games with music.