Adults have bias about boy’s behaviour. They think that boys are aggressive and uncontrollable. Although these qualities are not true for all boys, typically, boys have lots of problems at school. Therefore, in order to help boys with their problems at school, Early Childhood Assistants should pay attention to them, implement stimulating activities and know the child of family environment.
First of all, ECA’s should more pay attention to boys who acts inappropriate behaviour at school. Usually, boys engage in more rough and tumble play than girls. So, they have more physical accident such as bumping and pushing each other. Beside, boys who have lack of affection from their parents, or other people, they tire to get attention through their action. For example, boys do not more participate during the circle time. They make noise and run around the room instead of sitting on a carpet patiently and listening to teacher’s story. They think even if they do something wrong, they might be able to get attention from their teacher. Therefore, ECA’s should more pay attention to aggressive boys. By supervising them carefully, ECA’s could protect potential accident and children could play more safely at school. by showing ECA’s an interest to the boys continuously, they would know that being aggressive is not only the way of getting attention to other people.
Secondly, ECA’s should implement stimulating activities. Bascially, in the Early Childhood Education setting in Ontario, implementing activities has to be more children directed. So, the children spontaneously participate in the activities. For example, setting two or three different activities helps the children to explore various materials. Especially, boys have very short attention span. So, setting the activities at the same time would be helpful for the boys to expand their attention span. Also, if the boys spend time too much in indoor, they might have full of energy that they are not still enough to waste their energy. ECA’s could do introduce activity game which promotes not only children’s physical skills but also problem solving. Therefore, stimulating activities encourages the boys to decrease aggressive behaviours and promotes their physical, emotional, and cognitive skills as well.
The next, ECA’s should know about the aggressive boys of family environment. According to studying of Child Development, Heredity, environment and Socioeconomic status influences on child development. Neuroscience explains “how nutrition, care and nurturing directly affect the wiring of the pathways of the brain in the early period. Nurturing care in the early years has a major impact on how people develop throughout their lives. It affects children’s ability to learn, their ability to regulate their emotions and even their risks for disease in later life. Negative experiences like severe neglect or lack of appropriate stimulation lead to detrimental effects (McCain, Mustard, & Shanker, 2007)”. These days, many parents are both working to make a living. So they don’t really have time to spend time to with their child. For instance, the child might go to school while the parents are working. Then, when the parents get home, they might be too tried. By the time they are finished their dinner, it would be time to go to bed. Unfortunately, now days society do not make to have time for communication with their family members. The result of that, the child would have lack of affection from his/her parents. So, if there is aggressive child in school, ECA’s should know about the child circumstance to help them the child.
In conclusion, actually, boys are not born aggressively. Some boys are very calm or very energetic and so on. ECA’s are not able to force them to act nice or ignore their behaviours. Giving more affection, planning developmentally appropriate environment, understanding the child of family circumstance will be helpful for the boys can do well at school.
TOEFL listening discussions: A conversation between a student and a registration clerk during registration week