Important Developmental Milestones Group 4 Caleb Arthur, Crissy Bresson, Jason Hoehn, Laurie Parent, Sarah Reef

Timeline of Developmental Milestones for 8-11 Year Olds

Average Heights of 8-11 Year Olds Males Age 8 – Average Height (50”) Age 9 – Average Height (52”) Age 10 – Average Height (54”) Age 11 – Average Height (56”) Females Age 8 – Average Height (50”) Age 9 – Average Height (52”) Age 10 – Average Height (55”) Age 11 – Average Height (57”) As you can see, females start gaining a slight height advantage around 10 years of age. In the below timeline, you can see that females tend to start their growth spurts earlier than males.

Gross Motor Skills Improve During the developmental stages of 8-11 year olds, improved balance, strength, agility and flexibility support refinements in running, jumping, hopping, and ball skills. Increased body size and muscle at adolescence bring continued motor gains. Males and females attain: Increased running speed Increased vertical jump Increased throwing and kicking accuracy, distance and speed Continuous and more fluid skipping Increased ability to use their entire body in batting a ball Increased ability to dribble a basketball with a more continuous and relaxed motion

Other Important Skills and Factors Children integrate previously acquired skills into more complex, dynamic systems of action.  There are sex differences in motor skills.  Size and strength contribute to boys' superior athletic performance in adolescence, physical growth cannot fully account for boys' childhood advantage. Throughout this time period both boys and girls experience rapid growing of hands,arms, feet and legs which may look disproportionate. Self-esteem can be gained and lossed during this time period. Females tend to grow at a faster rate.  They usually hit puberty quicker than males do, which can sometimes lead to insecurity.  Females not hitting puberty also may face self-esteem issues. In both males and females – weight ranges have increased since 1990.  Child obesity is a huge problem the world is facing with currently. 

Childhood Obesity We believe an important aspect during the developemental stages of males and females from 8-11 years of age is (child) obesity.  Statistics show that children have been gaining more weight at a more rapid pace than ever in history.  We believe a good way to instruct ways to put a decline to childhood obesity is to encourage good eating habits and active play.  Just as responsible as the child - we believe parents play an enormous role in the development of body weight.  We need to stress parents not to take their children to fast food all of the time and to develop good eating habits (fruits, vegetables, dairy, etc.). 

Ideas to Use in the Classroom You can have a unit on the food pyramid and one activity you could do is have them create a food journal.  The students can track their healthy eating habits on paper at home and school.  Then they can graph to see how many fruits, vegetables, etc. they have had during that time period.  Another activity that can be done is to create healthy snacks in the classroom.  Students can work in groups to develop different ideas of what a healthy snack can be.  We could get the ingredients needs to create the healthy snacks and students could then taste test different snacks that they could make at home.  Finally, for physical health we would get together with the physical education teacher and collaborate on ways students can exercise in fun and different ways.  We could take time out of the day to do these things as a class and they could then do them at home.  These are different things that could be incorporated in the classroom to help with physical development and/or health. 

Ideas to Use in the Classroom In a classroom, teachers can use creative thinking to promote physical development and health within their lessons.  An example of this is something I had a teacher do for her math class. Jason had an idea from his own personal school days – we would play "problem ball".  In this, the teacher would start by throwing a NERF ball out to the class.  The person who caught the ball was then asked a question.  If they got it right, their team got a point, and then they would have to throw it to someone on the other team.  If you did not catch it, then you lost your turn, and the other team got a question.  This was definitely an activity that promoted physical movement as well as problem solving in a class you would not typically find that. 

Ideas to Use in the Classroom Another activity would be to discuss nutrition and the food pyramid. Kids at this age need more iron and calcium in their diets and are also exposed to too much fast food.  We could have our future classes write a cookbook of healthy, low cost recipes tying in language arts and math.  We could also have a discussion about being active and come up with a list of different ways to exercise. We would also discuss how many hours of TV the students watch and make a bar graph.  Then maybe make a class goal to get more exercise and watch less TV.

Conclusion In conclusion, we need to make a goal to incorporate these ideas into our future classrooms. If we don’t make an effort to get our future students more active and more knowledgeable to the child obesity problem: it will just keep getting worse. We should keep our students physically active and have them practice good eating habits.