LEARNING CREATIVE DRAMA WITH PROVERBS*
Language is a written and oral expression of emotions, ideas, beliefs, lifestyle, and desires. Language is also the most important tool that transfers culture from the past to today and to the future. Proverbs are important for transferring our values and national culture to following generations as well as teaching the intricacies of the Turkish language. The purpose of this study is to identify the effects of story based creative drama on developing the vocabulary of 4th grade students. The study was planned as a pre test and post test control group experimental model. The study adopted a mixed method to employ quantitative and qualitative techniques together. The study was conducted in an elementary school in Kirsehir on two 4th grade classes with one experiment and one control group. During application, selection of proverbs, generating and applying related meaning tests, generating related stories, animating these stories with drama, and post test process were selected. When understanding the proverb scores of students in the experiment and control groups were compared, the experiment group that learned the proverbs with stories had higher scores than the control group. However, this difference was statistically insignificant and there were significant differences between pre test and post test scores of the experiment student group. In teaching indirect and metaphoric concepts such as proverbs in elementary education and helping students understand these concepts, using creative drama was recommended for teaching such difficult articulation with correct usage.