4-6 Years Old Children's Creativity Curriculum Development And Effect Evaluation Research

Empiraical studies have illustrated that early childhood especially 4-6 years old is a critical period for creativity development,and creative potential of preschool children can predict their creativity in the period of adolescence.Creativity can be cultivated,so intervention targeting children's creativity will yield twice the result with half the effort.Based on creativity theories,combined with the experience of creativity intervention programs this study aims to develop children's creativity curriculum scientifically and systematically,and improve preschool children's creativity competencies.In order to illustrate the development and implementation process of children's creativity curriculum,researchers came up with Soup Concoction Theory tentatively by means of scientific metaphor.Teachers are like configurator of the soup,who need to grasp the key elements of creativity of pre-school children.This study summarizes five essential elements of pre-school children's creativity:language,thinking,action,social-emotional and personality.Games are adopted to contact five essential elements with the contents of five major areas.Various situations based on themes of social life are created,in order to stimulate children's intrinsic motivation,improve their thinking ability and promote diverse ways of expression.Meanwhile,co-operation and sharing can further benefit process of idea generation and implementation.It can also provoke social emotional,and then improve their creative personality.In order to demonstrate the scientificness and practicalness of Soup Concoction Theory and the relevant creativity curriculum,two mid-level classes of the kindergarten of Shaanxi Normal University were selected to participate in this research.Children in these two classes were randomly divided into two groups-experimental group and control group.Besides their normal plan,experimental group took the creativity curriculum once a week for 18 months.On the other hand,control group only took their normal plan.Half a month before and after the intervention,all groups took the test of Torrance Test of Creative Thinking and Embedded Figure Test.Participants with full data in both tests were 70 in total and they were selected to be analyzed.Results:(1)The post-test scores of experimental group and control group were generally higher than that of pre-test scores.(2)The growth of creative strengths of experimental group was significantly higher than that of control group,and the score of creative strengths of control group declined.(3)The overall creativity of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of control group.Conclusions:(1)Early childhood(especially 4-6 years)is key creativity development period,and their creativity develops along with their knowledge and social experience increases.(2)Preschool teachers and administrators should pay more attention on creative strengths,and advantages will fade without appropriate intervention.(3)Creativity curriculum based on Soup Concoction Theory is proved to be effective.Shortcomings,prospective solutions and future applications were discussed at last.