Lesson 4: Curriculum Planning
Learning Outcomes Upon completion of this lesson's material, students will be able
Teaching Read chapter 5 pages 160-177 Children learn best when they
All of these components add up to a program that is using developmentally appropriate practice! Physical Development Preschooler’s physical development focuses on the basic movement skills. They work on coordination as their body grows: –where is my body in space, eye-hand coordination, eye-foot coordination, balance, and motor planning to improve movement over obstacles. The connection between physical growth and healthy lifestyles is important to consider. Preschoolers need regular physical activity to help
Big body play has smiling children willingly participating in well planned, safe environments with adequate adult supervision and participation to ensure optimum benefits for children. As an educator, there is a need to watch children’s facial expressions and body language to detect any discomfort in play situations, and then communicate to the other children, what is taking place. Motor Development Large motor development includes increased functional use of limbs for activities such as jumping, running and climbing. Preschooler’s nervous system is still developing which may cause reaction time to be slower than older children. Preschoolers go through a sequential process to refine their skills. The sequence is a product of physical maturation, instruction, and opportunity to practice newly discovered skills. As an educator, one needs to foster acceptable risk taking that enables a preschooler to learn and practice necessary skills while minimizing the possibility of injury. A risk involves the possibility of suffering harm or loss that can be managed through planning and supervision. Something to think about: How many times have you seen a four year old with blisters or sores on the inside of their palms as they are learning to go across the monkey bars?
Fine motor skills are tasks that require precise control of hand muscles, careful perceptual judgement involving eye-hand coordination, and refined movements requiring steadiness and patience. Children make progress by having open-ended opportunities that develop their hand and wrist muscles and fine motor skills. Opportunities include working with playdough and clay, exploring and drawing, building with Legos, and pinching and pulling stickers or using clothespins. Social and Emotional Development During children’s preschool years they develop relationships with others, learn about themselves, and develop an understanding of how to regulate their own emotions. The development of these skills needs to be fostered by caring adults. Positive social and emotional development provides a firm foundation for cognitive and academic competence. Social Development Preschoolers are becoming more aware of what is going on around them. They become more connected to other children and adults beyond their immediate family. Preschoolers who form close, positive relationships with other adults develop attachments that provide a foundation for allow for more interest and engagement in school and they will be more likely to be socially competent in later years. Preschoolers are developing their play through social exchanges. A child may be observing other children while she engages in solitary or parallel play. These observations may lead to engagement in more mature sociodramatic play where she can determine a “role” to play with peers. Extensive involvement in sociodramatic play builds preschoolers’ social skills, is associated with better language and literacy skills, guides self-regulation and later school achievement. Emotional Development Preschoolers gain a greater understanding of emotions. Their ability to talk about emotions increases and they become better able to regulate their expressions of emotions and develop a clearer sense of right and wrong. Emotions serve important functions, motivating every aspect of their development and learning. Feelings of interest, pleasure, and curiosity encourage children to explore their world and motivate them to solve problems. At the same time, strong feelings of sadness, fear, or anger may cause children to avoid certain kinds of learning situations. An educator needs to be aware of a child’s temperament as well as their cultural context because they both will influence how a child will express her emotions. Preschoolers gain skill in developing social competence when they are able to describe and label their feelings, identify others emotions, consider why others may feel that way, and express their anger or distress in more acceptable ways. While these skills are developing, children are also developing qualities such as consideration for others, conscience, a sense of right and wrong, moral emotions (guilt and shame), resiliency and empathy. The development of these emotions is essential foundation for later years. Without these skills children are more likely to have later behavioral problems and be less helpful than other children. For more information about emotional development, please watch the following video
Cognitive Development Preschool children develop the ability to mentally represent items. Preschools gain a better understanding of past, present, future, they can create and participate in scenes that represent life, they can create roles and storylines with multiple participants, and they can act out an imaginary idea. Preschoolers become more efficient thinkers when organizing thoughts into categories, show more sophisticated use of symbols in their use of pretend objects in play and drawing for learning and communicating. With this being said, preschoolers can also be illogical, egocentric and one-dimensional in their thinking; there is a learning curve! Influences of Social interactions and Play Cognitive development in preschool years has important implications for children’s social and language development. Children construct their understanding of a concept in the course of interactions with others. Children’s initial knowledge can be challenged by what they hear, what they see and through interactions with others. Make-believe or pretend play, with guidance and support from adults, blossoms in the preschool years and allows children to make a number of cognitive gains as they try out new ideas and skills. Executive Functioning During the preschool years, the brain’s cerebral cortex and the functions that ultimately regulate children’s attention and memory are not fully developed, which accounts for some of the limitations in their capacity to reason and solve problems. Preschoolers have not developed the ability to know what to pay attention to or how to remember things, or had opportunities to practice self-regulation skills through sociodramatic play, and other environmentally supportive experiences. When preschoolers are given instruction and opportunity information-processing skills related to attention and memory, their skills improve. Attention is crucial to our thinking because it decides what information will influence the task at hand. The ability to focus attention and concentrate enhances academic learning, including language acquisition, problem solving, social skills and coordination. Memory strategies are deliberate mental activities that allow everyone to hold information first in working memory and then to transfer it to long-term memory. Preschoolers begin to use memory strategies; however this takes so much effort and concentration that they are not very useful. As with attention, adult guidance and opportunity improve their skill. Mental representations are internal depictions of information that presents to the mind in the form of an idea or image. Mental representation allows us to become more efficient thinkers and organize our experiences into meaningful, manageable, and memorable units. As a preschooler’s develop this skill, they are able to think ahead a bit before taking action, and their activities take on a more purposeful, goal-directed focus. Logic and characteristics of thought - Logic is the reasonable or sound judgement found in utterances or actions. A thought may be an idea, an image, a sound or even an emotional feeling that arises from the brain. Preschoolers are illogical, egocentric, and unable to grasp the concept of conservation, and at other times believe that inanimate objects have human thoughts, feelings and wishes according to Piaget. Preschoolers are able to have success when a task requires familiar elements and when they have time to focus on one thing at a time. Reasoning takes place when a preschooler is able to look at another’s perspective. Often preschoolers believe everyone else, sees, understands, and thinks the same way they do. They have a difficult time to understand that others do not all like the same foods they do, do not all call their grandmother “nana” or all live with their grandparents in a similar manner as the preschooler. Preschoolers will display some ability to reason logically when tasks are similar; consistent with what they know, and relate to what happens in their everyday lives. Concept acquisition and classification means making sense of the world and organize it into meaningful and manageable categories. Preschoolers make sense of their world by asking what kind of things are there in the world, and how do they relate to one another? Preschoolers often ask “why?”. This in part is because they are hungry for more and more information and explanations. As they gain more knowledge of things and how they work together, preschoolers can more naturally categorize according to more than one attributes length and size, color and weight, texture and depth, etc.. Magical thinking takes place when preschoolers give lifelike qualities to inanimate objects. Younger preschoolers often belief in the powers of fairies and unicorns because magic accounts for things they can’t explain. Older preschooler’s belief in magic diminishes when they realize magicians use tricks rather than magic. It is important to remember the importance of a teacher’s guidance and nurturing when promoting cognitive development. It is also important to remember that these same strategies support the “whole child” and later school success. For more information about cognitive development, please watch the following video
Language and Literacy Development Preschooler’s language and communication skills grow by leaps and bounds. As they grow, their language has significant implications across all domains of development and learning. Language development is necessary for later reading comprehension and across all other subject areas. Children’s early literacy experiences enrich their language learning. Oral language and communication that young children learn to understands and use without direct teaching is one of nature’s marvels. The people around a child serve as language models, and that is critically important in influencing the quantity and complexity of children’s growing community ability. Often preschoolers may be learning more than one language at a time. As children are learning their first language and a second language is introduced, preschoolers can speak without an accent. For more information about language and literacy development, please go to the following video
Assessment Lesson 4 Assignment Chose to read ONE of the following chapters from your Intentional Teacher text:
1 - Why did you chose this specific developmental domain? 2 - Plan THREE activity plans for this developmental domain using the template in the resource folder in BlackBoard. You will be graded according to the activity plan rubric. Lesson 4 Discussion Why is it important to look at large motor development in preschoolers?
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