Enhancing Development of 3-5 Years Old Child by Playing Program According to the Sufficiency Economy and Local Wisdom in Public Health Regions 7 And 8

Abstract

The objective of this study was to develop and assess the effectiveness of playing program based on sufficiency economic concept and local wisdom in enhancing the devlopment of children aged 3-5 years-old. It was conducted by using mixed method research design. The study samples were children of 9 child care centers randomly selected from all 9 provinces of the Public Health regions 7 and 8, one center per province. Children with special needs, disable children, and children with brain impairment were excluded. Prior to the implementation, the research team identified common local toys, folk tales and lullaby consid-ered to be traditionally appropriate for child development; and guidelines of the playing programs were developed based on research evidence and expert opinions including pediatrician, psychiatrist, psycholo-gist, and measurement and evaluation researchers. The playing programs were subsequently promoted to use in the selcted child care centers. Training workshops and supervision were conducted for teachers on the use of the guidelines. Pre- and post-implementation evaluations were conducted in both experimental centers and the controls which were other child care centers in the same sub-districts. It was found that the program implementation had created positive changes in the communities, which included (1) increased community participation from child care center personnel, volunteers, community leaders, Buddhist monks and local government workers in promoting the activities; (2) increased knowledge sharing among key community leaders and more contributions in toy making and child playing programs, and (3) increased communication between children’s parents and public health personnel in integrating the program into children’s daily learning activities. The main factors contributing to the success of this project were infor-mation sharing, parents’ participation and collaboration from all organizations in the community including the local governments. It was also found that the child developmental scores significantly increased in both experimental and comparison groups, from 64.79 to 80.09 and from 61.99 to 73.00 respectively (p<0.05). However, the proportion of children with normal development was significant higher in the experimental group (p<0.05).