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Article Title: Towards The Holistic Development of Children in Oyo State: The Scope of the Behavioural Objectives in Preschool Teachers' Lesson Plans
by Ishola Akindele SALAMI,

Abstract:
One of the benefits of Early Childhood Education, most importantly, the preschool education is its multi-foci target for holistic development of the children. A well-organized preschool centre which run developmentally appropriate programme is expected to ensure equal development of social, emotional, physical and intellectual skills in every child. To ensure this, the teachers are expected to plan every lesson with this laudable idea in mind by setting behavioural objectives (BOs) that can attain this goal. The skills acquired by preschool children in Nigeria, and in Oyo State in particular make one incertitude about the type of instructional activities and the BOs the preschool teachers have been setting; the extent to which the instructional activities, through the BOs, targeting holistic development of the children and the level of developmentally appropriateness and attainability of the BOs, hence this study. It was found out that the preschool teachers in the State concentrate their BOs on intellectual development in the expense of other developmental domains among others. Therefore, the BOs set by preschool teachers in Oyo State dictate, to large extent, the instructional activities exposed to the children with focus on intellectual development only and other developmental domains are neglected. It was proffer that there is the need for in-service training for the preschool teachers on how to set BOs that can ensure holistic development of the children among other recommendations

Keywords: behavioural objective, holistic development, developmentally appropriate practices, developmental domains

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