A child's cognitive perception of death

Modern technology and health practices of people today have resulted in people living longer than ever before. Also, the institutions of the hospital and funeral home today make death more physically distant from the child's world. It is not uncommon for the past two generations to have grown up to middle adulthood and not to have experienced the death of an immediate family member (Lerner, 1976). As a result, death today is viewed more as an intrusion on normal reality (Gordan & Klass, 1979).Catherine Goodwin is Special Education Coordinator, College of Human Ecology, The University of Tennessee. Phyllis M. Davidson is Associate Professor, School of Home Economics, Tennessee Technological University.     

Embodied meaning-making: using literacy-as-event to explore a young child's small world play

This article uses the concept of literacy-as-event to explore the embodied meaning-making of a young child during small world play. Recent developments in literacy research, influenced by relational thinking, have led to a reconsideration of how meaning-making unfolds in home and school settings. The concept of literacy-as-event suggests that meaning-making is unpredictable and dynamic, responding to novel socio-material interactions between texts, people, objects and moments. This view suggests that there is a need to ensure children have opportunities to engage with embodied and material meaning-making beyond shared reading events. In this article, small world play after a shared reading event is positioned as enabling socio-material meaning-making through embodied and material encounters with people and objects. A single episode of small world play is presented for analysis. A multimodal analytical approach is used, drawing attention to the embodied interactions between a child, her adult and objects. Analysis of the data shows that the young child's meaning-making involved moments of physical and material almost-hiatus, followed by erratic movements. These often unexpected fluctuations, between stillness and motion, created generative tensions between the child and her adult, enabling creative swerves in engagement between narrative action, character traits and story themes.     

From hitting and tattling to communication and negotiation: The young child's stages of socialization

The importance of supporting the young child's socialization process is presented from the perspecitive of a teacher educator/researcher, a parent, and a caregiver. The article describes four stages of socialization and offers recommendations for corresponding spacial needs, play levels, adult's role, group size, and activities/materials for each stage.     

The young child's gender schema: environmental input, internal organization

The relation among children's ability to apply gender labels, their tendency to emit sex-typed behavior, and their parents' attitudes and reactions toward sex-typed behaviors was studied. The children were observed at home with their parents when the children were 18 months old, before any of them had passed the gender-labeling task, and at 27 months, when half had passed (early labelers) and half had not (late labelers). At 18 months, there were no differences in the children's sex-typed behavior, but parents of future early labelers gave more positive and negative responses to sex-typed toy play. By 27 months, early labelers showed more traditional sex-typed behavior than late labelers; parents of early and late labelers no longer differed in their responses. At age 4, when given an inventory of sex stereotyping, early labelers scored higher on Sex Role Discrimination; there were no differeces on Sex Role Preference scores.     

"It is Floating 'Cause there is a Hole'": A young child's experience of natural science

In this article, a video-recording of a young child's (3.3 years) dialogue with his teacher about experiments with elementary physics concepts forms a base for a discussion of early science education in preschool. Although, according to Piaget's theory, the child appears to be at the pre-operational stage, we argue for a pedagogical approach which focuses his awareness on the most basic aspect of science, i.e. that phenomena can be explained (this foundational principle must be understood before specific scientific explanations can be understood). The focus for the analysis is on the verbal interaction between the child and the teacher within the social practice of the preschool and on how this interaction enables the child to test and prove a hypothesis formulated by himself. The interaction in the case study will be used here as an illustration and a discussion of an approach to education in preschool.     

Parental reaction to a child's hearing impairment

Traditionally, parental reactions to a child's hearing loss have been discussed in terms of stages of the mourning process. Although this framework has been helpful in describing parent adjustment, it appears too simple. Parents react in complex ways to their children's disabilities; these complexities must be considered when working with families. A model of transition that accounts for individual differences is used to discuss the potential interaction among variables associated with the mourning process.     

Helping the young child cope with death

Justin and Jenny had prepared for the space shuttle launch by cutting out pictures of Christa McAuliffe from the Weekly Reader. Their mother was a teacher, just like the new astronaut. During the televised launch, the three-year-old boy marched and twirled around. His five-year-old sister stood still and observed intently.Judy Ansell Ketchel is a second-grade teacher in the Southmoreland School District, Scottdale, Pennsylvania.     

Effect of science teaching on the young child's concept of piagetian physical causality: Animism and dynamism

The purpose of this research was to determine whether the young child's understanding of physical causality is affected by school science instruction. Sixty-four subjects, four and one-half through seven years of age, received 300 min of instruction designed to affect the subject's conception of causality as reflected in animism and dynamism. Instruction took place for 30 min per day on ten successive school days. Pretesting was done to allow a stratified random sample to be based on vocabulary level and developmental stage as well as on age and gender. Post-testing consisted of testing of developmental level and level within the causal relations of animism and dynamism. Significant differences (1.05 level) were found between the experimental and control groups for animism. Within the experimental group, males differed significantly (1.001 level) from females. The elimination of animism appeared to have occurred. For dynamism, significant differences (0.05 level) were found only between concrete operational subjects in the experimental and control groups, indicating a concrete level of operations was necessary if dynamism was to be affected. However, a review of interview protocols indicated that subjects classified as nonanimistic had learned to apply a definition rather than to think in a nonanimistic manner.     

Congruence between mother and handicapped child's view of the child's sense of adjustment

The responses of 22 physically handicapped children to selected items of the Piers‐Harris Self Concept Scale for Children were compared with their mothers’ responses to equivalent items of the Personality Inventory for Children. The direction of the responses, whether children were more or less positive in self‐evaluation than mothers perceived them to. be, was analyzed with respect to sex of child, type of school attended, and diagnosis of handicap (cerebral palsy or spina bifida). Only diagnosis of handicap was significantly related to the tendency for children to be either less or more positive in response to the items than their mothers, with cerebral palsy children more positive and spina bifida children consistently less positive in direction. Possible explanations are considered, with particular reference to the children's views regarding peer relationships.