This study attempts to discover the effects of creative, traditional play on creativity and
interpersonal, problem-solving abilities among five-year-old children.
The subjects of this study were forty five-year-old children in two classes of A Day Care
Center in the city of J, Jeollabukdo, Korea. Twenty children from each class were assigned
arbitrarily to an experimental or control group. The creative traditional play was assigned to
the experimental group over a twelve-week period. The creative traditional play was designed
by the researchers and confirmed through a preliminary study for two weeks. It included large
group activities (such as introducing and evaluating traditional play), small group activities
(such as reconstructing play and making play materials), and free-choice play activities. The
results of the study are as follows. First, creative traditional play improved, on the whole, the
creativity of the young children; all the sub-areas such as originality, fluency, flexibility, and
imagination were shown to improve. Second, the creative traditional play improved, on the
whole, the interpersonal, problem-solving abilities of the young children; the sub-areas such as
alternative problem solving and result prediction were shown to improve.