Effects of creative drama based life skills education program on 5-6 years old children's life skills levels

The aim of this study is to examine the effect of the creative drama based life skills education program on the life skills levels of 5-6 year old children attending preschool education. In this study, semi-experimental design with pretest-posttest and follow-up test control group was used in accordance with the purpose of the research. The study group of the research consists of children aged between 60-72 months (5-6 years old) who are studying in the kindergartens of a private school affiliated to the Ministry of National Education in Alanya district of Antalya province. Two groups were formed from the children in the study group, the experimental group and the control group. "Early Childhood Life Skills Scale" was applied to the children in the experimental group and control group before the applications. After the pre-test applications, the "Creative Drama Based Life Skills Education Program" prepared by the researcher was studied with the children in the experimental group for 12 weeks, 2 sessions a week and a total of 24 sessions. The children in the control group, on the other hand, continued their normal education curriculum with their teachers. Following the end of the applications, the same scale reapplied to the children in the experimental and control groups. The scale was reapplied to the children in the experimental group in order to monitor the permanence of the education program, 3 weeks after the end of the applications. The data were analyzed with the SPSS program after obtaining all the data. The normality of the data was determined by the kurtosis-skewness analysis. After reaching the information that the data were normally distributed, the analyzes were completed by using the t-test for dependent groups and t-test for independent groups from parametric tests. According to the findings obtained from the study, no statistically significant difference was found between the life skills levels of the experimental and control groups in the "Early Childhood Life Skills Scale" pre-test results. When the post-test results applied to both groups at the end of a 12-week study period with the children in the experimental group were examined, a statistically significant difference was found in favor of the experimental group. According to the results of the follow-up test applied to the experimental group 3 weeks after the end of the applications, no significant difference was observed in the life skills levels of the children and it was concluded that the effects of the education program were permanent. Keywords: Creative drama, life skills, preschool education.