Abstract:
This research served the following purposes: 1) to introduce folk dance movement activities for kindergarteners to develop rhythmic understanding; 2) to study the results of the effect of folk dance movement activities towards rhythmic understanding in kindergarteners. The representative sample group comprises of 18 students from Wat Kalayanamit School in which the students are divided into 2 groups of 9 students. The tools used in this research were 1) Thai folk dance movement activity plans; 2) international folk dance movement activity plans; 3) music understanding observation; and 4) movement observation. The process of research included the study of research and the researchers internship as teaching assistant. The researcher developed lesson plan, collected data, and analyzed data using percentage, content analysis, descriptive statistics and t-test The research results were as follows 1) the folk dance movement activities for kindergarteners in which the researcher has developed included 1.1) activities to develop steady beat, rhythm and note durations; 2) activities accompanied by one basic and one intermediate folk songs. Second, dancing with Thai folk music showed high level of students understanding than dancing with International folk music. (M = 4.56 , SD = .16), (M = 3.20, SD = .21). And by comparing the difference in achievement between groups like Thailand and international groups were not significantly different at And by comparing the difference in achievement between groups like Thailand and international groups by T-Test statistically were not different at the .05 level.