유아교육기관의 간식시간에 나타나는 만 3세 유아의 상호작용에 관한 연구

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify the characteristics of interactions of three‐year‐old young children with their peers and with the teacher during the snack time in childhood education centers. The subjects were children and teachers in Kindergarten A in N city in Jeollanam‐do, and the research period was March 5 to August 31 in 2012. During the period, 52 times of participation observation, video taking, recording and interviews were performed during morning and afternoon snack times. The summary of major results according to research questions is shown below.

Research Question 1. What are the interactions of three‐year‐old young children with peers during the snack times?

First, although there were no play things they made joyful snack time with language and imagination. They induced humorous responses with the use of repetitive vocabularies and imitation of famous in‐words. They expressed new and original ideas stimulating their imagination through imagining or imitating activities considering food as play material. As such, children did not focus on eating itself but made multi‐faceted search enjoying imagination play. Second, young children showed quick eating, arranging and behaving themselves at eating, while competing one another to have snacks. They felt pride and learned right eating habits and how to arrange things while imitating others’ behaviors. It showed that we need to educate them not to eat snacks quickly but to eat in time at optimal speed while making the right competitive behaviors among infants. It can be inferred that infants grow the sense of duty while making arrangement after eating snacks. It also suggests that teachers should guide them to have desirable eating habits because their eating habits are affected by the interactions of young children. Third, they felt intimacy through snack time and built friendship by sharing their experiences. They felt intimacy through conversations and body contacts, composed sympathy through similar experiences and made efforts to maintain relationship with friends through frank expressions of emotions. Therefore, teachers should understand diverse peer relationships that can be experienced in snack times and encourage them to build friendship during the snack time.

Research Question 2. What are the interactions between young children and teachers during the snack time of three‐year‐old kids’ class?

First, in snack time, we could see the teacher encouraging children to participate in snack time, proposing suggestions to make it a better snack time, sharing experiences related to snacks and exchanging supports and encouragements. The teacher selected snack time helpers to induce active participation, proposed behaviors to make snack time more enjoyable, shared experiences through favorite snack stories and helped them to finish snack in time. Through such interactions between the teacher and children, intimacy was created between them and they could be friends. Second, the teacher taught etiquettes, order, cleanliness and modesty through the snack time and let them have the right habits. The teacher taught them etiquettes through eating in good posture and not talking while eating, and asked them to keep an order through queuing. Additionally, the teacher taught cleanliness through arrangement and modesty through not playing with teaching materials and not roaming around. It suggests that such life habits will help them to have the right sense of value during the course of socialization. Third, they showed enjoying snacks when they had snacks that they liked. The teacher explained the efficacy of snacks and asked them not to be a selective eater. Additionally, emotional exchanges between young children and the teacher were shown sharing the joy. It was found that snack times could be a joyful time when young children could interact with the teacher.