Strategies for Utilizing Clothing in Teaching Nursery School Children in Lagos State.
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study was to utilise clothing as a strategy for teaching nursery school children in Lagos state. Six research questions were answered and two hypotheses tested at 0.05 level of significance. The area of the study was Lagos state. The study utilized two different designs namely: the survey and Quasi experimental design involving the pre-test and post-test treatment. The population was made up of all nursery school children of Government and private schools in Lagos state and their teachers.
Stratified random sampling technique was utilised to select the Local Government Area, schools, teachers and children that were involved in the study. The selected Local Government Areas (LGAs) for the survey and experimental studies were Kosofe, Somolu, Oshodi-Isolo, Badagry and Epe. However, the LGAs that participated in the experimental section were Kosofe and Somolu under the Lagos state Education District two. The total number of schools utilised were six.
The sample for the study was made up of three groups, two hundred and fifty teachers were utilised to answer research questions for the survey section of the study. The second group of respondents were sixteen teachers while the third group were 384 nursery school children who participated in the Quasi experimental section. To establish the reliability coefficient of the questionnaire used to collect data for the survey section of the study, the Cronbarch Alpha coefficient was utilised which was 0.9.
Also, the clothing lesson plans were trial tested on 20 randomly selected pupils in one of the schools that did not form part of the study. The test retest method and Pearson product moment correlation were used to establish the reliability of the instruments. The reliability coefficient was 0.83. The performance of the groups on the achievement test was compared. A questionnaire was used to collect data from the teachers. Conventional and clothing lesson plans in the five mathematics concepts as well as achievement tests on the different concepts were used for data collection for the experimental studies.
INTRODUCTION
The importance of clothing to human life can never be over-emphasized. Clothing is all items of apparel and adornment. Clothing according to Wikipedia (2007) includes body decorations, such as cosmetics, perfume, hair colour, marks on the skin, eyeglasses, handbags, shoe, socks, glove, cap, hat and hair arrangements, jewellery, badges and insigma of office or rank, extensions of the body in the form of canes, umbrellas and handkerchief. This is to say that clothing is covering for the body from the head to toe.
Clothing can also be referred to as culture. The use of clothing goes far beyond covering the body. Most people wear clothing but do not realize the importance as a learning tool for children. Rouse (1999) pointed out that the transmission of learned way of life is only possible because human beings have a highly developed and specialized ability to communicate clearly. Culture is a complex form of communicative system, therefore, nonverbal aspects of culture such as clothing communicates.
Rouse (1999) opined that clothing is not a random or totally individual affairs, it is a social activity, therefore, expresses messages in a form that can be perceived by other people by standing for and representing the messages. Clothing can be used in this regard as an important strategy in teaching various school subjects such as science, Mathematics, Arts, Social Studies most importantly in nursery schools where pupils need to be taught with concrete objects for better understanding.
It is in this regard that the National Policy on education of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (2004) section 2 No h gave one of the objectives as to “teach the rudiments of numbers, letters, colours, shapes, forms through play”. In other words, the elements of design in clothing which are colour, shape, form, texture and line are Mathematical concepts. In essence, clothing can be used as a good strategy in improving the teaching of mathematics.
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