Observation
I will make notes during my observation, then copy it up into a written report.
I observed the children for 45 minutes during free play. Today the role play house is set up as a garden centre. In the house there is a small table with a cash till and money, a shelf of garden equipment such as gloves , seeds, pots and trowels. At 9:10 Sophie and Tom go to play in the garden centre. Tom stands and plays with the till quietly whilst Sophie is more excited as she imagines planting seeds using the equipment. She shows signs of Piaget’s pre-operational behaviour in that she pretends to have flowers growing in the pots. Sophie and Tom both side by side and when She comments on her playing he only nods and makes a few noises. They are acting in a similar way to Tigger & Eore from Winnie the Pooh as one is very active whilst the other is more sedate.
Harry and Katie burst into the garden centre followed closely by Reece. Sophie squeels with delight whilst Tom appears unaware that the situation has changed.
“Hands Up! This is a stick up!” Harry yells. Sophie giggles and playfully puts up her hands. Tom corrects harry by saying that “It is a hold Up and stick up does not make sense”. Whilst this is going on Katie takes the money from the till and puts it in her hand bag.
As Katie closes the bag Reece bursts in though the door a claims: “you are under aressted!” Harry yells his reply, “you gotta catch me first!” and runs behind him and out the door, with Katie following him, they are all laughing.
Tom starts to collect the coins Katie had dropped on the floor then continues to put them back in the correct places in the till. He the replaces the fallen seed packets and shows me how he reads the instructions to plant flowers, he explains what you have to do. I could see the instructions and I knew that he was making up points to go with the diograms. Nether the less Sophie did as he told her and helps to put “soil” into the pots with the seeds in the middle. Tom says that the plants need water and light but he can’t explain why. Sophie places the 6 pots with seeds, soil and water onto the top shelf of the bookcase. She tells Tom that they will get plenty of what they need, and that they will “grow to be the biggest and bestest flowers in the whole world”
At 9:40 the children both go to the drawing table to draw what they think the flowers will look like when they have grown. They both fill the paper with bright coloured leaves and petals. At 9:45 both children help to tidy up the house.
Conclusion
The twins played well together and they both show signs of the correct development levels. I noted that the twins could play for 10 minutes with a few pots, they played by sorting them into categories and “growing” flowers. I also noticed how both Sophie and Tom tried to read labels and instructions on seed packets. These are all signs that the children are in the correct development stages, of Piaget’s theory. I recommend at my placement that during free play there could be more of a change in the role play house. Currently the house changes every few weeks, I think for the children to benefit fully from using the role play house they could change it every week or every other week.
Learning for me
I learnt to set up and clear away activities with the children’s help how to encourage exploration of colour and creativity. I managed to gain the children’s confidence and by doing so I helped them to reach their full potential.
Developed their fine motor skills, creativity and imagination in this exercise. They practice all sorts of skills used in everyday life. Like counting with the till, sorting pots by colour and size, both skills used in maths. They learned how to gain experience from everyday things that they see. They take what they have seen and put it into action to so they can learn form how it works. They learned how to co-operate and communicate with each other. They learn to trust opinions of the adults they work with, they learn to respect their knowledge and experience. I think that in the future the children could be put into groups to help them to mix into different social groups and form new relationships.
Evaluation
Children need to do activities that suit their age and stage of development. It is important to get the age and stage right for the children you are working with, activities that are too hard will be discouraging and the child will feel as it is failing. Children can learn from new activities and experiences that are interesting and a little bit challenging.
At age 3 children are in the pre-operational stage. The pre-operational stage is from the age of two to seven years. The most important development at this time is language.
Children develop an internal representation of the world that allows them to describe people, events, and feelings. In the pre-operational stage children can use symbols, they can pretend when driving their toy car across the couch that the couch is actually a bridge. Although the thinking of the child is more advanced than when it was in the sensorimotor stage, it is still qualitatively inferior to that of an adult.
Children in the preoperational stage are characterised by what Piaget called egocentric thoughts. The world at this stage is viewed entirely from the child’s own perspective. There for a child’s explanation to an adult can be uninformative. In Piaget’s theory he states that at age 3 children can use symbols, and they can use pretend play. At this age children will develop a range of language skills, they will start to recognise words by sound and spelling.
Piaget sates that cognitive structures change through the processes of adaptation: assimilation and accommodation. Cognitive development consists of a constant effort to adapt to the environment in terms of assimilation (interpreting events in the present) and accommodation (events in a changing cognitive structure.) Tom especially shows the early signs of this cognitive structure.
I feel that I accomplished my aim, as I observed the twins while they played in the shop.
Bibliography
Tassoni, P (2000). Diploma in Child Care and Education. Oxford, Heinemann’s.
Dilasion, K (2001) The ages and stages of children. Cambridge, lion books ltd.
