use of Thai Children Traditional Games Activities on Early Childhood’s Gross Motor Skills Development

Abstract

The purposes of this study were to promote early childhood’s gross motor skills development by using Thai Children traditional games activities and to compare early childhood’s gross motor skills development between pre and post use of Thai Children traditional games activities. The sample consisted of 20 students of Kindergarten 3 aged between 3-6 years studying in the second semester of the academic year 2019 at Ban Nonchai School, Muang district, Khon Kaen province. They were selected by simple random sampling. The design of this research was a one group pretest-posttest design. The duration of the experimentation with movement and rhythmic activities was 4 weeks, 5 days a week and 50 minutes a day.  The research instruments included 20 lesson plans with Thai Children traditional games activities and the assessment formats of gross motor skills of early childhood. The research statistics were percentage, mean, standard deviation, and t-test for dependent. The findings were as follows. The overall development of gross motor skills of early childhood children after using the Thai children traditional games activities in the post experiment was higher than the pre experiment in all aspects. It was found that running skill was at the highest level with =13.60 and respectively followed by jumping skill with = 13.00 and balancing skill with = 12.85. The results of the comparison of gross motor skills of early childhood children by using the Thai children traditional games activities were found that the overall and by aspect development in post experiment was higher than the pre experiment with statistical significance at the level of .01.