Physical Development Activities

Physical Development Activities

[WLOs: 3, 4] [CLOs: 1, 2, 5]

This week we begin working on elements that will become part of your Community Center Proposal Final Project. If you have not already done so, go to the Week 5 – Final Project and thoroughly review the instructions for creating the proposal. This week, you will be creating three activities that will become part of the infant room, early childhood room, and adolescent room of your center.

Prior to beginning this assignment, read Chapters 4 and 5, Sections 14.2 and 15.2 in your textbook, and the Physical Development: Motor Development article. Additionally, watch the Boys: Entering the teen years, Girls: Entering the Teen Years, and Playing videos on physical development.

Physical development, especially in infancy and toddlerhood but also into middle and late childhood, is primarily focused on the development of fine and gross motor skills. But the milestones and activities for each age group are very different. In adolescence, the fine and gross motor skills have been mostly developed, and the focus is about strength and skill building as well as dealing with the effects of puberty.

For example,

Coloring or playing with clay would not be an appropriate activity for an infant to improve fine motor skills, but it would be for the early childhood room.

In middle and late childhood, children are developing the muscle mass to greatly improve their abilities to run and jump and play organized games, which would not be appropriate for infants or toddlers.

There are many websites aimed at both parents and educators that describe activities to promote physical development. The activities you select do not have to be complex, but they do need to be age appropriate and grounded in developmental milestones. Focus on the primary developmental tasks of each age period. For each of the three activities, write a paragraph that addresses the following:

Describe the age appropriate activity in some detail (provide more than just the name of the activity).

Identify developmental milestones which supports the use of this activity (Table 5.1 in your textbook will be useful here).

Identify how the activity supports physical development for that age group.

The Physical Development Activities paper

Must be two to three double-spaced pages in length (not including title and references pages) and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s APA Style

Must include a separate title page with the following:

Title of paper

Student’s name

Course name and number

Instructor’s name

Date submitted

For further assistance with the formatting and the title page, refer to APA Formatting for Word 2013.

Must utilize academic voice. See the Academic Voice resource for additional guidance.

Must include an introduction and conclusion paragraph. Your introduction paragraph needs to end with a clear thesis statement that indicates the purpose of your paper.

For assistance on writing Introductions & Conclusions as well as Writing a Thesis Statement, refer to the Ashford Writing Center resources.

Must use at least one credible source in addition to the course text.

The Scholarly, Peer Reviewed, and Other Credible Sources table offers additional guidance on appropriate source types. If you have questions about whether a specific source is appropriate for this assignment, please contact your instructor. Your instructor has the final say about the appropriateness of a specific source for a particular assignment.

Must document any information used from sources in APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s Citing Within Your Paper

Must include a separate references page that is formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center. See the Formatting Your References List resource in the Ashford Writing Center for specifications.

Carefully review the Grading Rubric for the criteria that will be used to evaluate your assignment.

Waypoint Assignment Submission

The assignments in this course will be submitted to Waypoint. Please refer to the instructions below to submit your assignment.

Click on the Assignment Submission button below. The Waypoint “Student Dashboard” will open in a new browser window.

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Confirm that your assignment was successfully submitted by viewing the appropriate week’s assignment tab in Waypoint.

For more detailed instructions, refer to the Waypoint Tutorial.