The study sought to find out the effectiveness of forest play activities in daycare centers by finding out whether they have an impact on the emotional intelligence and playfulness of infants. To this end, we looked for differences in the emotional in...
The study sought to find out the effectiveness of forest play activities in daycare centers by finding out whether they have an impact on the emotional intelligence and playfulness of infants. To this end, we looked for differences in the emotional intelligence and playfulness of infants according to forest activities in daycare centers.
The study was conducted on 19 daycare centers located in Gwangju, Mokpo, and Muan counties, and 709 infants aged between 3 and 5 years old attending the daycare center.
The processing of the data was done using SPS 22.0 for Windows by means of technical statistics to perform mean, standard deviation, and frequency analysis. Methods for post-verification of independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA and Tukey HSD were implemented according to the number of groups of independent variables.
The results of the study were as follows.
First, with regard to the presence or absence of forest play activities, 67% of daycare centers conducted forest play activities, and those responsible for such activities accounted for 60.6% of forest play professionals. The monthly number of forest play activities was the highest at 57.5 percent for one to two times, and 68.5 percent for less than one to two hours. And 57.3 percent of daycare centers are run by forest experience centers run by local governments.
Second, an analysis of whether differences in the child’s emotional intelligence exist according to the presence of forest play activities (activity, time of activity, monthly number of activities, and place of activity) in daycare centers revealed significant differences in overall emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, self-control, awareness of others, and control of others. This showed that children who attend daycare centers that carry out forest activities scored higher in emotional intelligence than those who did not. And according to the duration of forest play activities in daycare centers, among the four sub-factors of the child’s emotional intelligence were significant differences in self-control, perception of others, control of others and overall emotional intelligence scores. Children in daycare centers who are engaged in forest play activities for more than two hours have a high score of emotional intelligence. Children's emotional intelligence scores based on the monthly number of forest play activities showed a significant difference in the overall scores of emotional intelligence, as well as in all four sub-indexes: self-awareness, self-control, perception of others, and overall, the emotional intelligence scores of children in daycare centers where forest play activities are conducted more than five times a month were higher. Depending on the location of forest play activities in daycare centers, there were significant differences in the overall emotional intelligence as well as all four sub-indexes of infant emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-control, and perception of others; and the scores of the child’s emotional intelligence were higher when operating in a typical forest.
Third, an analysis of whether differences exist in the playfulness of infants according to forest activity (activity, time of activity, monthly number of activities, and place of activity) in daycare centers has shown that there are significant differences in both the physical spontaneity, social spontaneity, cognitive spontaneity, expression of pleasure, and sense of humor, which are the five sub- factors related to the overall playability and playfulness of forest play in daycare. The study found that children who play in the forest have higher scores on the playfulness of children who do not play in the forest. Depending on the time of the forest play activity in daycare centers, differences were seen in the overall scores related to physical spontaneity, expression of joy, sense of humor and playfulness, which were the five sub factors related to playability. Playfulness of children in daycare centers, where forest play is conducted for more than two hours in terms of physical spontaneity, expression of joy and total score of playfulness, and 40 minutes to one hour in social spontaneity, cognitive spontaneity, and sense of humor were high. As for the number of monthly forest play activities in daycare centers, differences were seen across all five sub- factors related to playfulness: physical spontaneity, social spontaneity, sense of humor and playfulness. Children's daycare centers, which carry out forest play activities more than five times a month, were found to be high in both playfulness and sub-factors. Depending on the location of forest activities in daycare centers, the five sub- factors related to playfulness were found to differ in physical spontaneity, social spontaneity, expression of joy, sense of humor and overall score of playfulness, and the playfulness of daycare centers performed in the general forest was high.