Manifestation of Creative Clay in Kindergarten Language Courses

Abstract

Due to the love for art and demand for courses, a group of nursery department students from a university of science and technology have found that most kindergarten language courses commenced in kindergartens guide children through learning with the use of Chinese phonetic symbols or text-based flashcards. However, the combination of art and language will enable children to engage in hands-on art creation to achieve language learning in a pleasant manner. Therefore, the process of incorporating clay creation in language learning and teaching involves entering the kindergarten teaching site to implement specific aesthetics practices. With middle-grade children from a kindergarten in Tainan City as teaching targets, 60-minute clay creative language teaching was commenced every week. The teaching topics include: I Am A Teeth Model, I Am A Healthy Child, Collect Trees and Do It Together, which were implemented for a period of four weeks. Of the twelve children in total, nine were boys and three were girls aged between four years old and before the age for entering elementary school. The action research, coupled with the research and education site were adopted to continue to reflect on actions, act on the reflections, and explore the clay creative intervention of language teaching. In addition, feasible courses were planned to deepen children’s impression of language learning through clay creativity. With the identities of the homeroom teacher and the observer actually involved in teaching activities, through observations, records, reflective notes, and other methods, the course of teaching was recorded by incorporating clay creativity and children language teaching in order to fully present the actual course of teaching. Research results show that during the process of language learning, the children fully turned their ideas into action through hands-on clay play and freely created the faces of vocabulary created out of their own imagination, thus enabling the children to quickly familiarize and understand the vocabulary, enhancing their memory for the language, eliciting the children’s creativity, enabling them to improve hand flexibility and observation, and further inspiring their art talent and giving them a sense of honor from works created. It is a type of aesthetic teaching that is both educational and entertaining.