The participation of preschool children in artistic activities that promote their creativity and cultivate their imagination, contributes substantially to the formation of their personality and to the support of their learning effort, as supported by the Hellenic Pedagogical Institute. For preschool children who find it difficult to express themselves verbally, expression through the arts works supportively to enable them to express their feelings, thoughts, and ideas. Similarly, their engagement with other art forms, such as dramatic play (D.P.) in particular, has been found to stimulate imagination and develop motor creativity in preschool children. Moreover, it has been shown that creative thinking and movement are strongly interconnected. In order to investigate whether movement-based D.P. activities can enhance the creative thinking of preschool children, as it is reflected in their drawings, we designed and implemented an experimental D.P. program with an emphasis on movement. In this program, during the final phase (artistic elaboration) of selected D.P., children were asked to transform or expand on pre-designed patterns that they were given and to produce a title to their creations. The sample of the study consisted of 8 physical classes in public kindergartens (a total of 106 kindergartners).

For the collection and qualitative analysis of the research data the researcher's personal diary, the individual semi-structured interview with the kindergarten teachers as well as the study of the children's drawings, created during the intervention, were used. The drawings were analyzed using criteria obtained from the figural part of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and the relevant literature. The results showed that the children's participation in D.P. activities that encourage different motor responses and creative problem solving through movement appears to improve their creative thinking. In particular, the children's participation in the D.P. activities of the experimental program showed a gradual increasing trend in the emergence towards elements of imagination, originality, unusual illustrations, as well as titles with abstract elements in their drawings.

These results are confirmed by the individual interviews with the kindergarten teachers in the project as well as the research diary records on the improvement of the children's fluency, originality and processing ability over time. The movement-based D.P. appeared to awaken and promote the preschool children's capacity for creative expression at a motor, as well as cognitive and figural level.

Keywords: Divergent thinking, dramatic play, kindergartens, children's drawings.