TRADITIONAL GAMES IN PRIMARY SCHOOL CURRICULUM

Traditional games are cultural and national heritage. They, cultural and traditional activities transmitted from one generation to another, sharing different movement and cognitive games used in order to educate, to socialize, to share the experience and to influence toward development of young generation. The people create traditional games, and they represent the habits, culture and tradition of countries, region or even a town or village. There are lot of different traditional games. They could be movement games, cognitive games, games that implement music or dance, games of words etc. As part of the tradition, they transmitted mainly among family members and rarely are implemented in school curriculum. Considering the benefits that could be obtained by implementation of traditional games in schools, in this paper we made a short review of the traditional games- their characteristics, classification, influence that they had upon children's development and possibilities for their implementation in the school curriculum. Based on these, we made an analyses of curriculum in primary school education in Republic of Macedonia (1 - 5 grade) and try to detect, analyses and suggest the possible unites or activities in the curriculum where traditional games could be implemented. Different manners of their implementation as well as assumed benefits are also noted.