Abstract:

Integrated education in Lithuanian institutions of education proceeds grounding on provisions of values, abilities, knowledge and understanding, helps developing child’s ability to broadly understand and perceive the world [2]. Some foreign scientists [1; 4] maintain this opinion supposing that integration is a process and connection between two or more activities. It is a must to engage in music education of early age children, since in such a way the whole development in child’s evolution is being impacted [4]. The other researches enclosed that integrating music with reading, math, science, or social studies objectives became core academic objectives [5], more interesting to learn [6]. The need for music is innate and widely related to comprehensive education of a child, seeking of good results. The main problem is that there is a lack of didactic researches of music integration in pre-school age education. Didactic aspects, i.e. themes, aims and methods, of music integration into pre-school education of children are the research object.

The research aim is to reveal the aspects of music integration into pre-school education of children finding out what themes of pre-school education are the most frequent in terms of application of music integration and what groups of themes can be pointed out; what goals of integration are set and what methods and at what frequency are applied by pedagogues.

Methodology:
There were participated 327 pres-school teachers voluntaries in the research during three years (since 2017 till 2020). They wrote a detailed plan of integrated music activities in daily children education on the social media sharing their good practice and discuss on how music integration can contribute to education of children in daily work of pre-school education pedagogues. There researches selected only 81 detailed plans because of integration quality criteria and good example of didactic. After carrying out the analysis of detailed plans, the obtained results presuppose the need for conducting the survey of experts to find out in depth the causes of the obtained results. The focus group was employed: 12 pedagogues of pre-school education from two largest cities of Lithuania holding the category of an expert (teacher-master) attempted to explain the results of the earlier conducted investigation. The content analysis as qualitative data analysis was used in the research.

Results:
Integration of music into activities of pre-school education was mostly predominant in acquainting children with natural objects (domestic and wild animals, birds, bugs, trees, mushrooms, vegetables and plants), seasons (autumn, winter, spring and summer) and festivals (religious, family and patriotic); whereas music was being more rarely integrated in teaching children daily life skills, composition of the human body and traits. Usually, music is being integrated to acquaint with a specific topic and develop children’s skills (exploratory, linguistic, creative and daily life), more rarely to stimulate children’s motivation for cognition. However, teachers do not set a goal to develop musical literacy or expand cognition of music; therefore, music is employed as a complementary element to reveal a specific topic and educate in a complex manner.

Keywords:

Didactic approach, music integration, pre-school children, methods.