Browsing by Author "Hujanen, Emma"

The object of this bachelor thesis was to examine how to support the emotional skills of 3–5-year old children by using pedagogic material focused on music. In this thesis I’m analyzing the material by focusing on the six basic human emotions. Although musical elements, especially melody, rhythmics and tempo also play a big role, my main focus in this bachelor thesis is on the basic emotions expressed in lyrics. The goal is to get an idea of how these musical elements support the basic emotions found in lyrics. With this bachelor thesis I’m trying to get new information on how pedagogic material uses music and lyrics to support children’s emotion skills. In the theory part of this thesis I’m explaining what emotions are and on which stage children are on their emotion development during the ages of 3-5. After that I’ll clarify what researchers mean by emotional skills and the importance of emotions in children under the age of 7. From there I’ll move on to discuss how music is connected to emotions and in children’s emotional skills. The research material includes the first three books of Saahinkaisen Samettiviitta -music material. Papunet-website categorises these books as material that can be used for practising emotion skills by using music and sports. My research questions are; how the basic emotions and their expression are shown in Saahinkaisen Samettiviitta -music material’s lyrics and how the melody, rhythmics and tempo of the songs support the basic emotions expressed in lyrics. The research approach is qualitive and the technique I used was content analysis. There was no hypothesis in my research. The conclusions of this research show that in the first three books of Saahinkaisen samettiviitta music material, the lyrics didn’t focus much on the basic emotions. Joy sadness and anger were expressed by action, description of action and describing a facial expression indicating the emotion. Fear and amazement were mentioned in only a few songs and disgust was not expressed in any of the songs. Musical elements supported emotions the most in songs that expressed joy.