The purpose of this study was to develop a feasible early childhood exercise program in daily life in an attempt to assist early childhood education institutions and teachers to teach preschoolers to get exercise on a regular basis to promote their he...
The purpose of this study was to develop a feasible early childhood exercise program in daily life in an attempt to assist early childhood education institutions and teachers to teach preschoolers to get exercise on a regular basis to promote their health.
Two research efforts were made:
1. Develop a exercise program in daily life in which preschoolers can participate in early childhood education institutions.
2. Try out the exercise program in daily life and investigate what physical and mental changes it brings about to preschoolers.
The subjects were 16 preschoolers in a class of Western age 5 in A daycare center located in the city of P. After a draft of the program was formulated, an experiment was implemented to try it out during a 12-week period of time from February 7 to March 29, 2011. Data were gathered by asking their homeroom teacher to make a record of educational activities and keep a childcare journal, and additional data were collected by having an informal interview of the homeroom teacher. After all the data were gathered, a qualitative analysis was carried out,
The major findings of the study were as follows:
As a result of providing the early childhood exercise program in daily life to the preschoolers, it's found that the preschoolers underwent changes in body and mind.
Their physical changes were categorized into three: 'getting used to working out,' 'being flexible' and 'feeling well.' They got accustomed to working out and acquired a working-out habit as they learned how to be ready and how to work out while they continued to work out. Besides, they were able to work out correctly whereas they found it difficult to do that in part at first, and their body got more flexible.
Their mental changes were categorized into four: 'being happy,' 'concentrating,' 'being considerate,' and 'enduring.' They were able to concentrate their attention on their body as they enjoyed working out, and they learned to care about others and be patient even in case of having a hard time.
The findings of the study seemed to suggest that the application of the early childhood exercise program in daily life served to teach the preschoolers to build up a habit of working out to promote mental health as well as physical one. But the program was conducted just on a short-term basis of 12 weeks though they had to keep exercising in daily routine life, and the experiment was not long enough to produce generalizable results. In the future, prolonged and quantitative research efforts should be made to evaluate the effect of the program from diverse angles.