Dance incentives with unstructured material for children aged 3–4 years

In the preschool period, it is very important that children are encouraged and enabled as many opportunities as possible for them to create by means of various accessories and materials. The encouragements help children to express their creativity and imagination. They enable a child to develop her own ideas and opportunities to express her feelings and current mood. In the theoretical part of the diploma thesis, I described the development of dance and creativity in a preschool child. In the curriculum for kindergartens, the basic examples of the activities for children in various age periods are written, as well as important teacher’s tasks in the process. Furthermore, dancing incentives, the use of unstructured materials in physical and dance activities, the forms of dance education, and the meaning of communication in physical expression are described. In the empirical part of the diploma thesis, fourteen dance and physical activities are presented. The project was performed in a kindergarten in a group of children aged 3 to 4 years. I offered them different unstructured materials, i.e. cloth, newspaper paper and elastic band. Through the project, I wished to ascertain what will be the responses of children to the unstructured material, how the latter will influence on ideas of children within the dancing activities and to what extent the children will develop verbal and nonverbal communication. Above all, the results were visible in the ideas of the children which were acquired and upgraded by means of unstructured materials and in clear improvement in the field of communication among them. At the beginning, there was a lot of verbal communication. Later, however, nonverbal communication prevailed through movements