Didactic games as a teaching method in teaching about light in the 3rd grade of primary school

Play is defined as an activity that an individual enters spontaneousely without any extrinsic motivation for pleasure and enjoyment and not for the end result or consequences. A part of the wider term of play is the narrower term of didactic games which are inteded to help with the student's cognitive development, influence his thinking, reading, understanding of numbers etc. Didactic games increase motivation, interest and attention and make learning more interesting. In the empirical part I researched which levels of the revised Bloom's taxonomy and which learning objectives, which are set in the curriculum, are achieved by the students of three third grade classes of primary school after teaching the contents. At the same time I have looked into the possible connection between the achieved knowledge and the methods (didactic games and teacher centred approach) and summarizing at the end of lessons. I chose the topic of light for my research. The games I used are shadow theatre »Dance night«, a board game »Light detectives« taken from Vencelj A. (2016) and a quiz »The little light cells«. I conducted my research at a city school in central Slovenia. There were 60 students aged 8 and 9 included. There were 21 students in classes A and B and 18 students in class C. The sampling was nonrandom and purposive, the method was descriptive and a combination of the quantitative and qualitative approach. I used several different techniques and instruments to collect data. Before I executed the lessons I checked the students' knowledge with a test and a structured group interview. I tested the achievement of the learning objectives and the students' knowledge with a test after the lessons as well. The research has shown that students achieved learning objectives better in lessons where didactic games were used. The students progressed more at individual assignments in groups where didactic games were used than in groups where the teacher centred approach was used. The group taught with teacher centred approach progressed more in assignments on the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy, however, students taught through didactic games were more successful in achieving higher taxonomic learning objectives. Students who were taught with teacher centred approach achieved on average better results and have shown better improvement than students taught through didactic games. According to the average number of points achieved on the pretest and posttest I calculated the growth(g) for each group of students. The growth was positive for groups A and C, g = 0,25 and g = 0,54 respectively. I also researched the influence of concluding observations at the end of lessons on the students' knowledge. I found that they did not influence the achievement of learning objectives or test results for the students in my group. This was evident because the group of students that had to summarize the lesson and revise the lesson's content achieved lower results