The effect of sensory education program supporting the reading and writting skills of 61-66 month old children

The current study was carried out to investigate the effect of sensory education program supporting the reading and writing skills on the reading and writing skills of 61-66 month old children. The population of the research consisted of 61-66 month old children attending to independent kindergartens acting under the Ministry of Education in the central towns of Keçiören and Altındağ, in the city of Ankara in the educational year of 2012-2013. The sampling of the research were comprised of 52 children chosen randomly among the 61-66 month olds attending to an independent kindergarten. Of the children comprising the sampling, 25 were determined as the test group and 27 as the control group. In the research, ?General Information Form? was used to gather general knowledge of the children and parents; evaluation forms that were developed by the researcher were used in order to evaluate the application process of the sensory education program supporting the reading and writing skills were used; and ?The Test for the Investigation of Reading and Writing Skills of 61-72 Month-Old Children? that was developed by Yazıcı (2010) in order to evaluate the reading and writing skills were used. For the analysis of the data obtained in line with the main purpose of the research; the significance of the difference between the mean scores obtained by ?The Test for the Investigation of Reading and Writing Skills of 61-72 Month-Old Children? was tested through ?t Test at Independent Groups? technique in order to determine the equivalence of the test and control groups as the first step. Whether the difference between the corrected posttest mean scores depending on the pretest results of ?The Test for the Investigation of Reading and Writing Skills of 61-72 Month-Old Children? for both test and control groups was significant was tested through one factor ANOVA. In order to test the difference between the pretest, posttest and follow-up test mean scores at ?The Test for the Investigation of Reading and Writing Skills of 61-72 Month-Old Children?, two way ANOVA repeated measures were applied. At the end of the study, upon the comparison of the pretest achievement mean scores of the children in test and control groups, no significant difference was found (p>0.05), while a significant difference was found in favor of the test group in the posttest achievement means scores of the test and control groups carried out following the application of the Sensual Education Program Supporting the Reading and Writing Skills. In the comparison of the pretest/posttest achievement tests mean scores of the children in the test group, a significant difference was found in favor of posttest (p<0.05), also a significant difference was found in the comparison of pretest/posttest achievement scores of the children in the control group (p<0.05). In addition, upon the comparison of the pretest/posttest achievement mean scores of the children in the test and control groups obtained in ?The Test for the Investigation of Reading and Writing Skills of 61-72 Month-Old Children?, a significant difference was found in favor of test (p<0.05). While no significant difference was found in the comparison of the mean scores of the follow-up test applied to the test group children four weeks after the post test and the mean scores of posttest (p>0.05), the difference was significantly high in the comparison of the mean scores of follow-up test and pretest (p<0.05). It was found that this statistically significant difference was in favor of the total value of the follow-up test. The correlation between the forms filled out by the researcher and external evaluator depending on the observatory and visual analysis results with regard to the application of the Sensual Education Program Supporting the Reading and Writing Skills by teachers was calculated through Pearson correlation coefficient. The significance level was found higher in terms of scorer reliability (**p<0.01). Keywords: Preschool education, reading and writing skills, sensory education