The effect of the activities of montessori method on the development of manual skills of 5-6 year old children

The study has been made in order to analyze the effect of the ?Activities of Montessori Method? on the development of 5-6 year old children?s manual skills (Skills of Drawing-Painting and Object Usage). The sample is constituted with 32 5-6 year old children studying at the implementation centre under the Adnan Menderes University (ADÜ) Faculty of Education in the province of Aydın and a private kindergarten subject to the Ministry of National Education (MEB). In the research, a pre-test and a final-test have been used for experiment and control groups. After the experiment and control groups had been formed according to the model concerned, the sub-lists of the ?List of Manual Skills Control? (Skills of Drawing-Painting and Object Usage) developed by the researcher have been fulfilled as the pre-test. Throughout 12 weeks 48 activities have been applied to the experiment group in the Montessori Method education programme framework. On the other hand no intervention has occurred in the daily education activities of the control group. Following the 12 week process, the ?List of Manual Skills Control? has been applied on both experiment and control groups as the final-test and the data compiled has been evaluated. In order to determine whether the children?s average pre-test scores of the ?List of Manual Skills Control? and ?Sub-Lists of Skills of Drawing-Painting and Object Usage? have been significantly differentiated the Mann Whitney U Test and in order to determine whether the average final-test scores have been significantly differentiated the Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Test have been utilized.According to the data compiled no significant difference has been determined between average pre-test scores of the experiment and control groups for ?Sub-Lists of Skills of Drawing-Painting and Object Usage? of the ?List of Manual Skills Control? (p>05). Following the education programme designed according to the Montessori Method, a significant difference between the average final-test scores of experiment and control groups in favour of the experiment group has been determined (p<05).In conclusion, it has been determined that the manual skill acquisitions of the experiment group having the opportunity to take Montessori Education are higher than those children in the control group and studying in the Pre-School Education Program of the MEB.Keywords: Pre-School Education, Montessori Method, Manual Skills, Skills of Drawing-Painting and Object Usage