Developing creative writing and teaching literature in fourth grade of primary school

Development of creative abilities depends on the way of live of every individual and that is the reason, why there are some differences in their development among different cultures. The second and at same time the hardest part of developing creativity in Slovenian environment starts, when students are in transition from fourth to fifth grade of primary school. Creative abilities are at that time at the lowest point of its development and much more inflexible as in the other periods of lifetime (Blažić, 2000, str. 78). However, we can influence the development of creativity with different exercises that are based on divergent thinking. The »father« of divergent thinking, J. P. Guilford, defined divergent thinking as an ability to generate multiple solutions to a problem. Moreover, he associated divergent thinking to creativity and appointed it with several characteristics: fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration. Although divergent thinking and creativity are highly related, creativity needs appropriate conditions for its development. My thesis is devoted to reading literature and exercises of creative and re-creative writing based on it that foster vocabulary expansion, which is one of the key elements for developing creativity. In the final theoretical part of my thesis I make a review of the national curriculum for the subject Slovene in the fourth grade of primary school, with the main focus on the educational goals that support creativity. Results of my survey show that students are motivated for doing creative and re-creative writing exercises in literature class. Furthermore, I found out that students achieved more assessment criteria at the end of the survey in comparison to the beginning of it. Besides that, the results show that girls have done better than the boys in fluency of ideas. In addition, the fluency of associations among students expanded with the number of literature lessons that offered creative and re-creative writing