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Age Characteristics Chart

Age: Pre-Kindergarten to Kindergarten (ages 3-6)

Physical Development: During this period of life students are learning to master the use of their gross motor development, and they are developing fine motor skills. Mastering gross motor skills will give students the ability to run, jump, and play just like their older, more advanced counterparts. During this period some students can still have difficulty with such tasks as, hopping on one foot, walking backwards, skipping, jumping rope, as well as many others. Students will have difficulty with tasks that involve use of fine motor skills. Children must be taught how to hold a pencil, how to cut, tie shoes, and glue. All of these tasks involve the use of their fine motor skills, and therefore, prove very difficult until a child has achieved mastery.

During this stage, the students’ body is grossly out of proportion. The students head is a large percent of his body weight, and until the child reaches a growth spurt, it will remain that way.
Teaching Applications: During this period, any type of P.E. activity can be a learning experience for the child. It will provide them the opportunity to gain mastery of their gross motor skills. A good idea to remember is that when having students take part in activities, try to make them do some type of gross motor skill that they haven’t mastered yet. For example, in Kindergarten, instead of having the students run regular races have them do hopping, or skipping races.

Emotional Development: During this period students are taking their first steps toward independence. For most of them this will be their first time leaving their homes for long periods of time. The student must learn to cope with different types of stressors, such as leaving their parents, making friends, and learning about what it means to succeed and fail. Children will either be in Erickson’s stage of Initiative versus Guilt, or entering Erickson’s stage of Industry versus Inferiority. If they are still in the crisis of Initiative versus Guilt, then they will be using newly acquired language and motor skills to discover who they are. If they have proceeded into Industry versus Inferiority, then they will be focused on setting goals for themselves, and either achieving them, or failing at them and feeling inferior to those around them. Slavin (2003) writes that, “During this stage children start trying to prove that they are ‘grown-up’; in fact, this is often described as the I-can-do-it-myself stage,� (p. 82).

Teaching Applications: Give children the opportunity to use their skills to discover who they are. For example, letting students draw something that describes what they like to do, or even something as simple as writing a sentence about their favorite food, or color can help students achieve a sense of who they are, and understand that they are unique. Students at this age can use invented spelling to write sentences as long as they have a grasp of the alphabet sounds and symbols.

Social Development: During this period peers take and increasingly important role in the development. Slavin (2003) writes that, “Children’s relations with their peers differ in several ways from their interactions with adults,� (p. 73). This social interaction differs in that, it gives this age group the opportunity to interact with those at the same level of development, and it allows them to learn how to settle disputes since , “in a peer dispute, no one can claim to have ultimate authority,� (Slavin, 2003, p. 73). Because they must learn to resolve conflict, they must learn how their behavior affects the feelings of those around them, and take that into consideration. Children begin to take part in several types of play; solitary, associative, and cooperative. Students learn to cooperate in order to achieve a common goal, and in this way they learn how to work together, and how to take others opinion into consideration. Something that we take for granted, is that since this may be the first time the student has ever socialized with peers, the student may not understand what it means to compromise, or how to share. These skills will be developed during these years.

Teaching applications: I think that the best way to help students develop in this area is to give them the opportunity for play. One way to do this is to set up your classroom in stations. My classroom is set up for five stations and one of those stations is usually just for play. It is usually blocks, or legos, and it gives the students time to learn how to interact with each other. It is also good to have stations because I obviously cannot be at all of the stations at the same time, so the students must learn how to solve social problems independently.

Cognitive Development: During this period, students are in Piaget’s preoperational stage. It is during this stage that children can begin to use symbols to represent objects. This means that symbols can be understood as representations for sounds, and therefore the alphabet can be understood. Children begin to grasp the concept of numbers, and how they can represent any quantity of objects. Some important concepts that are understood are; conservation, centration, and reversibility. During this period students remain egocentric in their thinking. Slavin (2003) writes that, “Children at this stage believe that everyone sees the world exactly as they do,� (p. 36).

Teaching Applications: Because the students can use symbols to represent objects, teachers can begin teaching the alphabet, and manipulation of numbers.

References

Slavin, R. E., Educational Psychology, 2003, 7th Edition, p. 36, 73-82.

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The story I am responding to is A & P by John Updike. I really liked the story, I thought that it was a good example of a young man coming of age and challenging his authority figures even to the point of self sacrifice. In the story the manager of the A & P supermarket talks to some girls about dressing inappropriately in his store. This causes the main character, Sammy, to question his boss’s authority and his decision to embarrass the girls. This is how Sammy comes of age in the story. He decides to quit his job even though it will upset his parents. He decides to leave the store because he realizes that he cannot continue to work for a boss that he doesn’t respect.

I like how in the end of the story the main character realizes that due to his decision the world is going to be a much harsher place for him. He realized that doing what you feel is right will sometimes cause you to sacrifice things that make your life easy. The main character, Sammy, decides to do what he feels is right, rather than doing what is easy.

In the story there is a big difference between the main character and the customers in the A & P. The customers in the store advert their eyes as the girls in their bikinis pass. They all just stand and listen as the boss embarrasses the girls. Some of them probably agreed with the manager of the store, and if they didn’t they certainly were unwilling to say so. Sammy however, completely disagreed with the actions of his employer and he was willing to sacrifice his comfort to challenge his boss. The patrons of the store were unwilling to come out of their comfort zones to confront the store manager. I think this may have been a reason why Sammy felt compelled to say something to his boss, nobody was willing to challenge the bosses authority, besides him. Maybe when Sammy was challenging his boss, he was also challenging the customers is the store. Maybe this was Sammy’s way of challenging all of society.

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This movie was extremely funny! It was made by HBO so it was meant to be somewhat educational, but also to be very interesting to watch. It talked about the contemporary lifestyle of Puerto Ricans and Cubans in American Idol.

It showed a young man who was from Puerto Rico and it talked about what he liked to be called. I never really realized the differences between, Mexican, Hispanic, and Chicano etc. I had always thought that they meant the same thing. This young man said he didn’t like to be called Hispanic because he said it sounded like he was ashamed of his true culture. It said that he liked to be called Chicano because he wasn’t ashamed of where he had come from.

Hispanics are the single largest Minority and growing. This is according to the 2000 census. They will soon no longer be a minority. So why are they still feeling ashamed? I think the basis for this movie was for Hispanics to not be ashamed of who they are. This was a calling for them all to embrace their true origins with pride. This is hard thing to do in this culture.

This young man was an Elvis impersonator and he was very funny. I thought it was great that the movie was so funny yet it had a very important message in it. They also had the first Mexican woman to be on a presidential cabinet on the movie. It was interesting to see how her pride in her culture varied from the young man who was an Elvis impersonator. Although they both had great pride in which they were they went about different ways of expressing it. The purpose of the movie was to show people that no matter how they chose to express it, it didn’t matter as long as they did express that pride in their culture.

I think this pride in your culture should be a universal theme, not just for Hispanics, but also for everyone. Everyone should have pride in where they came from, and nobody’s culture is better than anyone else’s. Some people think that they are better than others based solely on where they came from. But these stereotypes are not true. Just look at the woman who was on the presidential cabinet.

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