Middle and Late Childhood (6-12 years) Physical Development

1. Middle and Late Childhood (6-12 years)Physical Development • Growth and Body Changes • Children grow more slowly. • Weigh (5 or 6 pounds) • Height (2 inches per year) • Similar growth patterns(boys Vs. girls) • Body proportion (thinner & slimmer) • Muscles become bigger and stronger • Lung capacity gives greater endurance and speed.

2. Does variation in height, strength and speed among children only rely on the result of heredity? • Motor Development • Age and experience are much more important determinants than gender. • Children become more skilled in controlling their bodies. • Specific skills are developed depends on somewhat on the children’s environment.

3. Can girls gain equal scores in games as boys? • Brain Development. • Children’s brains appear to be organized differently than adult brains. • A stroke in a young child of 6 or 7 might have no subsequent effect on the child’s language development, whereas the same kind of stroke in an adult would normally cause permanent loss of language abilities. • Memory span increases fairly steadily and one type of improved efficiency is simply faster response time. Faster response is due in part to the physical development that occurs in the brain, but also to the fact that children at this age are becoming adept at using more cognitive strategies to help them solve more complex tasks.

4. The plasticity of the brain allows for amelioration of effects if children are placed in a loving, supportive foster care home. There are 3 to 15 percent of children experience more difficulty with processing visual or auditory information.

5. Dyslexia • There are 3 to 15 percent of children experience more difficulty with processing visual or auditory information. • Dyslexia is a disorder in which an otherwise normally intelligent, healthy child or adult has extreme difficulty learning to read.

6. Genius and Giftedness • Neuroscientists and psychobiologists have found that more efficient brains have rich neurol interactions and a multiplicity of synaptic connections. • It has been hypothesized that child geniuses might have more complex synaptic connections in the association areas of the cerebral cortex or that their neurochemical transmissions might be more efficient. • Gifted children aged 7 to 12 typically need additional intellectual challenges.

7. Health and Fitness Issues • Children are much healthier and the most common illness is upper respiratory infection. Accidents are the major cause of death or serious injury in this time period. • Do children still need supervision and care while they are playing sports? • Children in middle childhood still need adult supervision and care. The greatest number of sport injuries for children in this group occur when they are playing basketball, football or baseball, bicycling, and using playground equipment.

8. Violent • Violent and aggressive behavior is often learned early in life, and steps need to be taken in families and communities to help children deal with their emotions without using violence. • One of the strongest findings was the children ‘ do what they see,’: Television and realistic video or computer games produce violent images, and depict sex, use of tobacco and alcohol.

9. ObesityWrite down the facts that make obesity to children? • BMI = Weight(Pound)/ Height(feet) • BMI categories; • Under weight =< 18.5 • Normal weight = 18.5 to 24.9 • Over weight = 25 to 29.9 • Obesity = BMI of 30 or greater • Being overweight as a child greatly increases the risk of being overweight as an adult such as depression, a result of negative self-image, low self-esteem, teasing and rejection, and withdrawal from peer interactions

10. Eating Disorders • In many countries, the growing number of elementary and middle school children, mainly girls, are diagnosed with the eating disorders of anorexia and bulimia. • Mom’s dieting habits, family environment, media, and friends influence children’s eating behaviors and a child’s denying regular nourishment causes poor health, fatigue, or even death. • It is imperative that parents, teachers, and school nurses learn about the typical signs and causes of this disorder.

11. Role of play and Exercise • Children are required to participate in physical education classes during the regular school year, unless they have an illness or disability that prevents their participating. • Healthy girls and boys of this age have a difficult time sitting in a classroom all day without being able to expend their tremendous energy. • Physical activity and play contribute to a positive attitude, reduce the effects of stress, improve overall mental health and cognitive functioning.

12. Cognitive Development • Children become more adept at processing information as their reasoning abilities become progressively, more rational and logical. • Piaget’s Period of concrete operation • Conservation: understanding that the physical characteristics of an object or substance or quantity remain the same even their physical appearance may change. • Attain decentering, transformation and reversibility. • Horizontal Decalage.

13. Classification Hierarchies: flexible grouping of objects into classes and subclasses; allows children to solve class inclusion problems. • Use inductive logic. • Transitive inference: given two statements such as John is bigger than Bob, and Bob is bigger than Allan, can infer that John is bigger than Allan.

14. Post-PiagetianCritism • The difference in acquisition times does not necessarily fit with Piaget’s notion of stages. • Research found that it appears to make a difference how much experience or expertise a child has with the objects involved, for children can perform more complex operations on tasks they are familiar with as opposed to ones that are novel to them. • Other research has focused on whether the development of concrete operations can be accelerated, not just by general experience with objects, but through specific training on how to do conservation tasks.

15. Creativity • Is a natural gift sufficient to produce creative effort? • What seems to be required is the fortuitous convergence of innate talent and a receptive environment. • Although creative people may have innate talent, they must nurture their creativity with their decipline and hard work.

16. Respect children’s questions and ideas. • Respect children’s right to initiate their own learning efforts. • Respect children’s right to reject, after serious consideration, the ideas of caretakers in favor of their own. • Encourage children’s awareness and sensitivity regarding environmental stimuli. • Create ‘ Thorn in flesh’- confront youngsters with problems, contradictions, ambiguities, and uncertainties.

17. Give children opportunities to make something and then do something with it. • Give youngsters opportunities to communicate what they have learned or accomplished. • Use provocative and thought-producing questions. • Encourage children’s sense of self-esteem, self-worth, and self-respect.

18. Information Processing (Another view on cognitive development) • Need to understand whether there is a change in the basic processing capacity of the system (hardware), and/ or whether there is a change in the type of the programs (software) use to solve a problem. • Children at this age might be better at dividing tasks into more manageable segments and with regard to memory, children at this age might become more efficient at using the mnemonic strategies of rehearsal and categorization.

19. Children’s Perception of Others • The elementary school years are a time of rapid growth in children’s cognitive understanding of the social world and of the requirements for social interaction. • The greatest increase in children’s ability to distinguish people’s characteristics occurs between 7 and 8 years of age. • A description by a 7-year-old girl about a woman she likes.

20. She is very nice because she gives my friends and me toffee. She lives by the main road. She has fair hair and she wears glasses. She is forty-seven years old. She has an anniversary today. She has been married since she was twenty-one years old. She sometimes gives us flowers. She has a very nice garden and house. We only go in the weekend and have a talk with her.

21. A description of a boy by a 9-year-old girl. • David Calder is a boy I know. He goes to this school but he is not in our class. His behavior is very bad, he is always saying cheeky(impudent) things to people. He fights people of any age and he likes getting into trouble for it. He is always being told off by his teachers and other people.

22. Language DevelopmentLearning any language is a lifelong process. • Children from the ages 6 to 12 continue to acquire subtle phonological distinctions, vocabulary, semantics, syntax, formal discourse patterns, and complex aspects of pragmatics in their first language. • The complexity and cognitive level of their language increases as a reflection of their academic studies and life experiences.

23. Vocabulary • A fifth grade learns as many words as 20 new words a day and achieves a vocabulary of nearly 40,000 words by age 11. • Children begin to understand that words have multiple meanings, and they can use this new skill to tell jokes and ask riddles. • Syntax and Pragmatics • Begin studying grammar, for they understand applying rules to language. • Recognize errors in syntax and use complex structure.

24. Do the children use the formal style of vocabulary and syntax when talking with anybody? • Recognize that they can modify their voice, volume, and even their vocabulary, depending on the context of the interaction. • Research showed that children of all social strata engage in code switching, and their pronunciation, grammar, and slang all change in this process.

25. Limited English Proficiency(LEP) • For children whose first language is not English, three different approaches has been used in the United States to open the doors to mainstream education: ESL, bilingualism, and total immersion. • ESL (English as a Second Language) • Focused on teaching children English as quickly and efficiency as possible. • The amount of time a child needs to join the mainstream class depends on the background formal education. • Children devalue their first language

26. Bilingualism • Provides instruction in both languages by teachers proficient in both. • Bilingual programs have consistently shown the greatest gains for children in academic skills and in social and emotional skills. • Attack ( costly, recruit teachers, diversity of language spoken in a school) • Total Immersion • Children are placed in regular classroom (with or without support in their first language), and English is used for all instruction. • The theoretical basis of total immersion is that language is best learned not when it is an academic subject but rather when it is useful and that children are motivated to learn the language in order to understand what is going on around them.

27. What educational approach is used in Phillippine? • Assessment of Intelligence • The abilities can appear to vary due to the time at which we assess them, the methods we use, and the specific task we ask them to perform. • Differences in school-age children are based on academic performance in school and intelligence testing using psychometric tests. • This makes sense because in school these differences play a major role in determining how children learn and what educational program best meet their cognitive needs.

28. Individual Cognitive Styles • The differences in how individuals organize and process information have come to be called cognitive styles. • Cognitive styles are powerful heuristics that cut across traditional boundaries between intelligence and personality and influence a person’s preferred way of perceiving, remembering and using information.

29. Learning Disabilities(LD) • Learning disabilities is a disorder that affects people’s ability to either interpret what they see and hear, or to link the information with different parts of the brain. • Youngsters are diagnosed as having a learning disability when their achievement levels falls two or more grade levels below their ability, as predicted by IQ test score. • The sources of such disabilities are varied and include combinations of genetic, social, cognitive, and neuropsychological factors. • LD children have problems in reading (dyslexia), writing (dysgraphia), or in mathematics (dyscalcula). • LD do not automatically lead to low achievement.

30. Describe the possible harmful effects of labeling children as LD? • Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) • ADHD is the newest name applied to a complex disorder that has long puzzled professionals. • Diagnostic terms • brain damaged child syndrome (1940s) • minimal brain damage syndrome (1950s) • hyperactive or hyperkinetic syndrome ( 1960-1970) • attention deficit disorder (early 1980) and the current ADHD

31. Symptoms • Typically youngsters who cannot in their seats, wait their turn, follow instructions, or stick with a chore are viewed as having ADHD. • Researchers are finding antisocial activity, conduct disorder, and substance abuse in many adults who were deemed hyperactive in childhood. • Such individuals are easily distracted and make rapid decisions, act quickly, and bring boundless energy to bear.

32. Causes • Experts have advanced a variety of theories to explain the disorder. • Example: genetic defects, poor parenting, food additives, spicy foods, allergics, lead poisoning, fluorescent lights, insufficient oxygenation, and too much television. • Some youngsters, intrusive and overstimulating care appears to play an important part. • An interactive or transactive model combining genetic and environment influences might best explain the development of the disorder.

33. Cures • The use of amphetamine drugs, primarily methylphenidate, better known as Ritalin, in the management of ‘problem’ children is widespread and is increasing. • Physicians believe that the medication somehow allows the hyperactive youngsters to attend to critical aspects of the learning situation and to filter out distractions. • Side effects with the medications- insomnia, gastrointestinal distress, dizziness, weight loss, and retardation growth.