Article Name 1: ‘The Clouds are alive because they fly in the air as if they were birds’: A re-analysis of what children say and mean in clinical interviews in the work of Jean Piaget.
Article Name 2: Educational Implication of Piaget and Vygotsky language learning theories in Pakistani context: A review.
Article Name 3: Piaget’s cognitive behaviourist account of conservation in mathematics
Article Name 4: Jean Piaget’s ideas about foundations of education
Article Name 5: Outcomes of nutrition knowledge and healthy food choices in 5 to 6 year old children who received nutrition intervention based on Piaget’s theory
Summary
Physical activity and play are topics which have been always stressed upon by a number of various sources because of the high importance attached to it. Being active, feeling energetic, reducing stress are all such advantages which are associated by physical activity. In addition, movement is often emphasized to be incorporated from a very young age in order to broaden its benefits. The article talks about the impact of physical activity in fostering learning and development amongst young children. For this reason, the author has targeted children between 3 to 5 years; a period typical to motor and learning skills development. Physical activity is not only incorporated to build upon the motor skills of a child or to aid him in his learning experience, instead it also helps him better resolve problems, establish relationships and enable him to respect social norms and rules. The study was based on a sample of 270 kindergarten students where they were grouped according to their motor abilities. Children were not only observed to grow and improve via the activities, but they were also asked to draw their bodies where their perceptions changed with time. The growth in social competencies, autonomy and imagination was gradually evident amongst these children.
Article Critique
The article titled as “The moving body”: a sustainable project to improve children’s physical activity at kindergarten by Serpentino (2011) has been chosen for this paper because of the way it highlights the importance of physical activity in the form of play amongst children; a truth that has been forgotten by today’s society.
Although the article highlights the importance of physical activity for individuals from an early age, Sepentino (2011) has not based his study on the realm of cognitive and motor development as laid down by Piaget. There are a number of similarities between the work of Sepentino (2011) and Piaget because of the fact that the work by Serpentino (2011) has adopted a strategy to acquaint children with the use of different words along with the idea of egocentrism. Although as put forward by Piaget (1955), this cognitive developmental stage is marked between ages 2 and 7 years and referred to as Pre-operational stage, the author has only focused upon children between 3 and 5 years of age. If the author had given a coherent reference to the theory of Piaget (1955) and included his name, his work would have been more authentic. Also, the results of this study suggest that play has the power to aid development earlier amongst children as compared to the different ages as summarized by the developmental theories of Piaget (1955) and Erikson (1950).
In contrast, the Serpentino (2011) has remarkably studied the ways in which physical activity in the form of play help children grow and develop physically as well as mentally. The author has clearly based his study on a defined objective of introducing play amongst children so that not only their body movements are improved, but the way they see the world and maintain relationship also gets attention. As a matter of fact, the author has given a new route to his study by not dividing his sample on the basis of age groups as he discovered that motor abilities do not specifically differ on the basis of age groups as studied widely. However, grouping the children based on their motor abilities improved their learning and performance as they tend to imitate children with better abilities.
Thus, the author greatly addresses the significance of play in recent times where children of today are influenced by video games and computer which eventually results in stress, poor performance, little concentration and other unhealthy impaired behaviors. Therefore this article suggests the importance of play which should be incorporated at school as it helps develop the motor skills of children along with enhancing their cognitive abilities and social competencies.
REFERENCES
Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York: Norton.
Piaget, J. (1955). Perceptual and cognitive (or operational) structures in the development of the concept of space in the child. Acta Psychologica, 11, 41-46.
Serpentino, C. (2011). ‘The moving body’: a sustainable project to improve children’s physical activity at kindergarten. International Journal of Pediatric Obesity, 6(S2): 60-62
