Fairy tales are a basic way of mediating social, ethic, and cultural values to children. The form of a story is accessible and understandable to children. By their definiteness fairytale characters enable children to understand and differentiate the good and the evil, the right and the wrong, the positive and the negative more easily. Mental handicap influences the whole personality and proves by a lower level of rational abilities and a different way of perception. Nobody has specified so far to what extent fairytale characters influence the development of mentally handicapped children. The aim of my work was to find out whether mentally handicapped children know and perceive fairytale characters and whether they are influenced by them similarly to healthy children. The examined complex included ten children with a medium-severe mental retardation aged 12 {--} 19. The research was carried out by semi {--} structured dialogues with children, their parents, and school workers. I also used a method of structured observation and anylysis of products. All the ten children meet with fairy tales regularly. All children prefer audiovisual forms of fairy tales. The parents of three children stated that they also read fairy tales to their children. The children were able to name 3 {--} 18 fairy tales. They were able to present their favourite characters together with their characteristcs. In nine cases it was a positive character, one child gave a negative character. Eight children could name both positive and negative characters. A typical fairytale character of a devil is understandable better than a character of a water sprite, which is ambiguous for them. In a free drawing fairytale topics occured only sporadically in figural and technical motives. The occurence of fairytale motives in spontaeous children´s play and their conversation was also sporadic. Understanding a fairy tale and fairytale characters is limited with mentally handicapped children. Although audiovisual forms of fairy tales are criticised in literature, for these children they seem to be more accessible. TV interpretation of a fairy tale is more understandable for them. It mediates information for more senses simultaneously and thus it has a bigger chance to capture them.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:nusl.cz/oai:invenio.nusl.cz:49825 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | KREJČOVÁ, Irena |
| Source Sets | Czech ETDs |
| Language | Czech |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess |
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