Mason is the youngest out of three children and he is the only boy. His oldest sister is 15 and his older sister is 11. The three of them are really close and both girls enjoy taking him out to the park or to see the ducks and swans by the river in Maidenhead town. I think this is good for him as he is getting out a lot and there isn’t arguments about who is going to look after him when. They are an extended family as the majority of the family live roughly ten to fifteen minutes away from them. This is good as Mason will be able to see more family members than just the ones he lives with. Both parents do not work and his mum and dad are divorced, he has a step mum and soon to be step dad. When the parents go out either the other biological parent looks after Mason or his oldest sister.
Mason shares a bedroom with his 11 year old sister and has most his toys set up around the room. He plays mainly in the living room, garden (on the trampoline and on his toy motor bike.) and outside the front of the house with his best friend (who lives across the road). The house is detached and at the end of a cal-de-sac. He has lots of toys and loads of books. The toys are guns, army men, lots of footballs and a toy that looks like a laptop and you can play hangman on it and lots of other learning games. His favourite kind of books are ones about animals that either pop up or have something you can flip out or pull out. The type of area he lives in is a city suburb.
Mason gross motor skills are very good. He can walk very well and can get up and down the stairs as well as anyone else. He likes climbing up on things like tables and his motor bike to get onto the trampoline. He can hop, skip, jump and balance really well. He can kick, throw and catch a ball well as he plays football a lot. He is learning to ride a bike at the moment. He can do his own buttons and zips but sometimes he asks for help is the buttons are really small or if the zip gets stuck. He opens all the doors in his house and can open the safety net on the stairs. He can do 9 piece puzzles quite well but sometimes has some difficulty finding the middle bits as he doesn’t like getting the outside bits first. He holds a pen like a pincer grasp and likes drawing and writing stories.
Once you get to know Mason he is very well behaved for you and if you take him to the park he asks is he can go on something e.g. the swings before running over to them. He always says please and thank you and tells his mum off if she asks him to stop doing something without saying please first. He enjoys sharing his felt tips and his crisps/ chocolate. When you are playing a game with him he wants you to try it first to see if it’s hard or easy, if you say it’s easy he doesn’t like to do it. He behaves differently to strangers and doesn’t like the company of people he hasn’t been introduced to. He gets on well with people once he knows them. When you wake him up and he doesn’t want to wake up he has a stressy fit and will refuse to do anything until he has woken up properly and had a drink. He can go to the toilet by himself and brushes his hair and teeth by himself. He has a bath by himself but with the door open and can wash and dry himself. His mum or older sister washes his hair for him. He can get dressed by himself if the buttons aren’t too small. I think that Mason has got all the gross and fine motor skills there is but he just needs to work on them a little bit more.
From my research I can see that Mason is above average as he can do all the things a three year old should be able to do and most of what a four year old can do (based on Child development, edited by Judi Sunderland). I think he is like this because his sisters are doing the things he wants to be able to do and they are teaching him how to do them.