Middle Childhood
Middle childhood is where my passion for students is. Middle childhood ranges from 6-11 years old kids. A brief description of what middle childhood is, “The school years are marked by improved athletic abilities; more logical thought processes; mastery of basic literacy skills; advances in self-understanding, morality, and friendship; and the beginnings of peer-group membership” (Berk, 2017, p. 6). I find this age group relevant to my future because I want to pursue a career in elementary school teaching or counseling. Every Sunday at my church I work in the elementary age kids group. I lead about an average of thirty kids in worship and small groups. Even though sometimes they are hard to handle, I see myself being
…show more content…
There are three major features that I would say middle childhood contains. The three features are physical, cognitive, and social. Physical is based on body growth and nutrition. Cognitive deals with how students excel in different ways at school. Social means how students interact with schoolmates and how they respond. They all are different aspects of a child, but they connect with different places in their lives.
Physical growth, during this age period, continues at a slow pace like it did in early childhood, but now health issues can start to occur. Nutrition is a key concept in a school-age child’s life. “Today, 32 percent of U.S. children and adolescents are overweight.” (Berk, 2017, p. 228). This is an eye opener that something needs to change in children’s nutrition at home and at school.
The cognitive features of a child through middle childhood is just as important. Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory is described as, “Development occurs as the brain grows and children exercise their innate drive to discover reality in a generally stimulating environment.” (Berk, 2017, p. 22). This theory helps people look at individual differences. There are four different sections that are looked at when dealing with cognitive development, those are conservation, classification, seriation, and spatial reasoning. These four things separate children by their strengths.
During middle childhood, social understanding, to me, is
When children do not eat a healthy meal, their concentration and energy become more difficult to manage. The “Journal of School Health” issued a study in 2008 about the eating behaviors of approximately 5,000 school children. The research showed that children who ate more fruits and vegetables, accomplished higher grades on tests compared with children who consumed a high-fat, high-salt diet
Childhood, as we all know, is the state or period of being a child; the early period in the development of something (Merriam-Webster). The movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) illustrates five different children with each having different behavior, and they have one thing in common they are the only child in their family. These children are in the middle childhood, primary school age, around age seven or eight. What makes them different from each other is interesting. It allows the viewers to think if their behavior is either result of their experience or how they were raised. How they perceive things and how they behave are part of their cognitive development. The major domain of early childhood development is their cognitive development and the arguable aspects of the Nature-Nurture.
The middle childhood is to leave the play years to start maturing years to start adolescence (Berk, 2010). During the middle childhood, children began to have a lot physical changes. As well as, they begin to discover there identify that they are. For example, secondary sexual organs begin to develop in the boys and girls, they will confuse about identify. The puberty is the cycle when children are out of control because they will transition to leave the children to enter adolescence. For instance, physical and behavioral changes will have some consequences if pre-adolescences do not deal well with them. Middle childhood is divided into two categories 6 to 8 and 9 to 12 years that reflects on children’s behavior (Nuru-Jeter et al., 2010). For instance, children learn to interact with other children, and how they will manage emotions and behaviors. Also, how they have to act with adults and children that totally different it. Also, the girl and boy have different physical and behavior changes for the gender difference. Middle childhood development makes for some factors that influence on physical changes, brain and nervous system, and social and emotional changes.
As adults, they are also at an increased risk for coronary heart disease and atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) compared with those not overweight as adolescents.” It is important to help reduce the growing trend of obesity in children and young adults, as it has been documented in recent studies that children who are overweight tend to carry this problem with them into adulthood. Revitalizing the school lunch program would be an incremental place for the government to start revamping the obesity problems that they have caused in children. David Satcher stated in HEALTHY and Ready to Learn that, “Well-nourished students tend to be better students, whereas poorly nourished students tend to demonstrate weaker academic performance and score lower on standardized achievement tests. The majority of U.S. children are not eating a balanced, nutrient-rich diet. Inadequate consumption of key food groups deprives children of essential vitamins, minerals, fats, and proteins necessary for optimum cognitive function (Tufts University School of Nutrition, 1995). Children who suffer from poor nutrition during the brains most formative years score much lower on tests of vocabulary, reading comprehension, arithmetic, and general knowledge (Brown & Pollitt, 1996). In a 1989 study, 4th graders with the lowest amount
They form relationships with their peers, develop spoken vocabulary, and began to decipher between genders and their roles. Middle childhood is the development of personality, motivation, and inter-personal relationships. Growth at this stage is usually slowed until puberty is reached. Children at this age tend to learn by hands-on learning activities.
Health issues like obesity are rampant due to low levels of nutrition in food served in public schools. Childhood obesity is a serious disaster in today's world as it is on the reverse spectrum of as eating disorders such as bulimia or anorexia nervosa, but still carries with it serious health implications that can affect an individual throughout their lifetime. One specific factor playing a role in childhood obesity is the fact that the food eaten by children is not nutritious.
School lunches, curriculum focus, and daily activities have changed in elementary schools over the years. The nutritional value in school lunches often meet a bare minimum. Curriculum is focused strongly on idealistic future careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; but often forget teaching basic healthy habits needed for lifelong health. Physical education is no longer required every single day. Obesity has become an epidemic and not just for adults, it is increasingly affecting children as well. Children spend a generous amount of time in the classroom. They spend more time in school than at home or anywhere else. Therefore, schools have a responsibility in preventing obesity in adolescents by teaching them healthy habits, serving them nutritious food, and providing them with adequate physical activity.
At the centre of Piaget's theory is the principle that cognitive development occurs in a series of four distinct, universal stages, each characterized by increasingly sophisticated and
Middle Childhood is a time where where children develop their skills for building healthy social relationships with other children or adults. Also this is the stage that will prepare them for later developments such as Adolescence and Adulthood. Additionally this is where the sense of an inner subjective self develops for the first time, this is a time when sexual and aggressive urges are repressed aldo the child learns the values of their
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development proposes that a child’s capacity to understand certain concepts is based on the child’s developmental stage. He outlined 4 stages of development that spanned a child’s age from birth through 11 years old. The list below presents a summary of the characteristics typical at each stage:
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development is where the child goes through four different distinct periods in their lives like infancy which is between the age of birth to 2 years old. This is where they are starting to sense everything around them (sensorimotor). Early childhood is from the age 2 to 6
Middle childhood is defined a number of ways, but perhaps best defined as the ages 6 to 12 years of age or prepubescent to pubescence Middle childhood is a challenging time and a major challenge is social constructs, as this is the earliest time when children begin to move away from parental influences and establish more meaningful peer and other adult relationships. It signifies a new set of social contacts with adults and other children as well as a wider variety of settings than those that characterize early childhood. Children begin to see themselves as a part of a bigger whole. Peer influences can become more powerful than the adults in the children’s life and impact their sense of self. Grouping is established and teasing of others
The second domain that describes children in middle childhood is cognitive development. Unlike physical characteristics, cognitive development emphasizes on mental development of children. Cognitive development consists of information processing and language (Santrock, 2008). In the aspect of information processing, developments of memory, thinking and metacognition are experienced by children in middle childhood (Santrock, 2008). According to Papalia et al. (2009), the efficiency of working memory of children during this stage improves substantially. This means that they are able to make calculation, organize information into groups, and repeat and reverse at 5 or more numbers that they heard. Besides, children in middle childhood are able to think critically, deeply, and think in different dimension of the task during middle and late childhood (Eccles, 1999). According to the concrete operational stage in Jean Piaget’s theory, operational thinking of children in middle childhood includes four aspects which are logic, decentration,
In this essay, I will discuss my experience during middle and late childhood. I will address three stages which are the physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development. The physical development consists of body and brain growth, health issues, and motor skills. The cognitive development consists of language, memory, and attention. Socioemotional development is based on relationship, employment, and personality.
We need to communicate with others in our communities, solve problems, and attain goals. Around middle school, we start growing up into young adults, which requires us to expand our learning. For example, the adding and subtracting becomes more complicated as we confront difficult word problems about real life situations, and we are only able to do the math if we can read the word problem. Obviously, at middle school everything learned in earlier academic grades begins to come together.