Gender Differences in First-Year School Childrens Language and Movement - Term Paper Example

? Gender Differences in First Years Boys and Girls Insert Task Gender Differences in First Year School Children’s Language and Movement Introduction Children’s learning and language expression get integrated with play and movement. Playing games utilize the use of language as children grow in their different stages. According to my observation, it is clear that maximum growth and learning for first years children in school takes place through movement in form of play. It is through play and movement that children have the potential to learn and communicate their feelings, ideas, needs and thoughts. The language value that takes place during movement normally enhances or augments the children’s activities in play. Children start exposing increase in growth in decontextualization capabilities between the ages of three and three and a half years. They display their abilities in themes of the play and knowledge about self and other relationships in the environment. In addition to that, language and play instills insight in a growing child’s symbolization of skills and knowledge. Despite this aspect, my observations provide insights that indicate differences among children across the board in their development of symbols. Gender is counted to be among the aspects that cause these differences in children (Piaget, 192). The basis of this paper stems from this point to assess whether gender fits to be one of the aspects that cause frequency together with the value of language and movement during children’s free play. During my observation, I found out indications that physical playing has the potential for providing special opportunities for developing language in children. However, it is important for a child to be comfortable with movement activities for successful imitation and responding to verbal cues during their play activities. Many young kids who may have enough space to run while playing and are encouraged to do the same grow and develop this comfort in their natural ways. I observed that kids might start using their skills in language to improve their playing activities through communicating about whatever they are doing or through verbal problem solving when they take part in physical movement activities. My observation reveals that schoolchildren who participate in high level of elaborative play activities and movement as they relate with peers have a greater chance to practice verbal communication in their plays than schoolchildren who have little interaction with their peers while participating in plays or engage in sedentary games (Fein, 1981). The other factor that affects the kind of language and movement, which children use in their play, is related to gender. Children engage in different games and play activities. This comes out in the categories of themes, the type of plays, the level at which children participate in plays and issues that relate to choices of partners. According to my investigation, it is clear that that first year children in school, girls engage in activities that go in line with domestic activities that will normally require little physical movements. On the contrast, boys normally play games that relate to most of occupational plays, which may need an increased level of activities (Piaget, 192). Boys tend to participate in exploratory games while girls engage in dramatic games more than boys do. An important aspect to note in the observation is that children segregate themselves through the participatory level of play physically. In this relation, boys and girls will tend to participate in plays with same same-sex partners basing on the level of play structures. This means that girls and boys who preferred physical movement during their play participated in the game with other peers with similar preferences in physical movement. Contrastingly, peers of different sex could not play freely with partners from the opposite sex who had similar preference for a particular physical movement. Another observation also pointed that very young kids have ability to segregate themselves then spend most of their time with peers of similar sex in a mixed school in their first year (Pellegrini, A.etal., 2007). According my observation, girls and boys make interactions with their peers basing on play patterns together with the physical activity level. Boys and girls participate in separate types of games and plays. Therefore, they can experience different level of activities and the type of language they use during their play. This paper has intentions to determine whether there are gender differences in the first year schoolchildren in relation to their free play. Specifically, the paper has identifies how language plays a great role in improving play among children, the frequency in which children combine language in their games and the level at which physical movement occur when children play freely. Method Participants A total of six children comprising of three females and three males were selected from a pool of first year children participating in a large scale study. Citing the importance of consent, their parents had to provide it through a written and signed document. The children’s age ranged between three years and one year. Participating children attended two different institutions all-day schools on a Midwestern University campus. The children fall under same category of socio-economic status basing on educational attainment of their parents who were college students and professors. Every child participating in my research put on a developmentally appropriate uniform that had a microphone and an accelerometer that helped in collecting movement samples and oral communications (Fein, 1981). Processes The first step involved observing children while playing freely with their colleagues in the field. I keenly engaged in recording the average years of children and their gender in a booklet. There was video recording for all children for thirty minutes while they participated in their free play activities from their classrooms. All the class teachers and their assistants were encouraged to interact as normal with the kids. Transcription of the video tapes was done immediately after the completion of the recording process. It included both the non-verbal and verbal behaviors of kids together with children’s movement. Examination of full transcripts was done to establish the overall number of words produced in the entire thirty-minute segment. Three-minute segment whereby children engaged actively in play were observed carefully to establish the kind of language that they used to communicate, related to movement, play or social augmentation. This can be seen from the appendix part of this paper. According of the full transcript was done to provide intensity of sedentary, physical movement, easy and slow, vigorous or moderate as indicated in the appendix. The number of existence of behaviors that had interest was counted precisely within every category. Individual examination of girls and boys took place to establish information and analysis done for through descriptive statistics (Fein, 1981). Results Language Table 1 provides the total number of words that individual children used during their play activities. Participants 1, 2, and 4 gave the highest number of words during the thirty-minute period of recorded play, which are 119, 100 and 179 words respectively. The total number of words ranged between 43 and 179 words. However, the average number of words for boys was 92 while girls had 87.33 words. Close examination of the functions of communication for children’s non-verbal or verbal interactions in the entire 3-minute period of play revealing noticeable differences between genders of children as indicated by figure 1 (Fein, 1981). From the same table it is clear that girls experienced communicative characters that helped to augment their plays providing a mean of 55.67. This was also accompanying their movement mean of 25 (Fein, 1981). On the contrary, augmentation of the play by boys gave a mean of 33 and movement related reached to the mean of 16. Boys had high social communicative skills than girls. They had a mean of 14 while girls had a mean of 11. Additionally, both girls and boys used language frequently to for augmenting their play as compared to movement and social related purposes (Schilling etal., 2006). Table 1 Number of words. participant Gender Number of Words 1 2 3 4 5 6 F F F M M M 119 100 43 179 49 48 Figure 1.mean frequency of verbal and non-verbal communication through communicative purpose for girls and boys during the entire period of three-minute free play.   Figure 2. Mean frequency of behaviors of movement by the level of intensity for girls and boys during the entire period of thirty-minute free play. Movement The physical concentration of movement indicated differently little across all the six children with all of them involving in stationary play at a higher frequency than any other form of movement as figure 2 indicates. For all the combined six children indicates that almost 85% of the overall period of thirty minutes of the free play engaged in stationary movement. The first participant gained the highest frequency in fast movement of 4 occurrences, participant 3 together with participant 6 lacking any instances of fast movement or moderate during their play (Schilling etal., 2006). Discussion The main questions of this paper pointed towards determining whether gender has an effect on children’s movement and language during their free play period. Six children took part in my observation research and recording of their activities for thirty minutes in their first year classrooms. The results showed that there were no overall variations in the number of produced words or in the movement types that was exerted by the girls and boys. However there was a noticeable variation among individual kids whereby three one boy and two girls, of the six kids produce twice as many words as the rest of the children. Greater variations arise in the kind of communicative behaviours kids used to during their free play period. Girls communicated frequently on their movement and play as compared to boys, who managed slightly on the social communicative purposes than girls did (Schilling etal., 2006). Comparing language used during particular kinds of physical events, there were no variations that arose. Group wise children used higher behaviors of non-verbal and few vocalization characters during the complete three types of coded plays. In most cases, kids engaged in non-verbal characters such as shaking and pointing their heads. Lack of appearance of any difference among children relating to movement can be an attribute of the segments that were selected for analysis. Similarly, the kinds of physical activities were collected and examined in all the six kids versus the randomized incidences. The current paper reveals consistency with the earlier researches on gender differences in schoolchildren in their first year. Through my own examination, I understood the purpose of language in schoolchildren and indentified that males are very assertive in social interaction than their counterpart females. In this paper, it is also true that girls used purposeful or play related characters than boys. However, boys engaged in slightly more often in interactions socially than girls did. Another observation on this issue is with regard to gender variations on the kinds of play, which boys and girls engage during their free time. The findings are revealling that boys engaged in sort of exploratory games more than girls did while girls engaged in dramatic games more than boys did. All the three girls in this paper participated in dramatic plays like role-playing a nurse when playing with a hospital kit. On the other hand, two of the three boys engaged in exploratory plays like wondering around the room form one activity to the other (Fein, 1981). There were several limitations during the observation process. The first problem is that little number of schoolchildren was involved in the process. This means that the results can not present the large extend of the first year boys and girls in school. The kids in the study came from middle and upper SES and from one school setting and could not give the typical aspects of the general children’s population in the schools. Children in the study were particularly identified basing on amount of activities and movement in which they engaged. The choice of the kids also based on their age, which required being similar. Further inquiries that examine gender disparities between first year children’s play and language as they shift with time may probably include kids from various SES backgrounds and various age groups. This will enable to make clear determination of effects of age on language and movement when children play (Fein, 1981). References Fein, G. G. (1981). Pretend play in childhood: An integrative review. Child Development, 52(4), 1095-1118 Pellegrini, A.etal., . (2007). A short-term longitudinal study of preschoolers’ ( Homo sapiens ) sex segregation: The role of physical activity, sex, and time. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 121 , 282-289. Piaget, J. (192). The language and thought of the child. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Schilling, T., etal (2006). Promoting language development through movement. Teaching Elementary Physical Education, 17, 39-42.   Appendix Language Coding Movement-Related: Language that was spoken during moderate or fast movement. Social: Language that was spoken during any social engagement. Play Augmentation: Language that was spoken to enhance play. Movement Coding Stationary: Little to no movement. (i.e. A child watching other children playing or sitting at a table coloring with little movement of limbs or trunk) Moderate movement: Fairly intense movement, in between stationary or fast movement. (i.e. Fast walking, skipping, hopping, or jumping.) Fast movement: Movement described as intense or extreme. (i.e. running, continuous skipping, hopping or jumping Read More