The method of creative movement and teaching the Slovene language in the fourth grade elementary school with special curriculum

The development of literacy in children with intellectual disabilities that are included in the adapted primary school programme with a lower educational standard is crucial because literacy gives them better prospects in further education and because a certain degree of functional literacy is expected of them later in life. Much attention is therefore given to teaching such children literacy. What has to be taken into account here is that this process is substantially prolonged, that it requires a lot of adaptations, a more in-depth dealing with content and a slower work pace, with the key factor being the motivation of the pupils, which leads us to seeking and implementing different teaching approaches. One of such approaches is the method of creative movement that was tested in our research. Neuroscientific research has shown that movement also stimulates cognitive processes. In addition, language and body are closely interconnected and used in everyday social interaction. Creative movement is a comprehensive teaching approach that joins this connection and simultaneously stimulates creative thinking. Many elements of this method have already been used in working with pupils with intellectual disabilities, but in Slovenia we only rarely find data on the basis of which we could monitor its successfulness. The research involved 21 fourth-grade pupils of a primary school for special needs children, divided into an experimental and a control group, and checked whether the method of creative movement ensures the same or better results in developing individual elements of literacy in comparison with other traditional special pedagogical approaches. We monitored the impact of the method on reading comprehension, the ability of forming meaningful texts and orthographical precision in writing. The results of the research have shown statistically significant differences in activities that required a greater independence and creativity of the pupils, but not also in answering questions about the read text and orthographical precision in writing. Although affective factors were not systematically monitored, the teacher’s observations made it clear that the pupils in the experimental group showed more interest in and motivation for learning, there was more communication between them and less undesired behaviour and fewer difficulties with directing attention. On the basis of our findings, we can conclude that it makes sense to combine the method of creative movement with the already established approaches of developing reading literacy