Observation Of Chime Preschool

I love children and I find them entertaining and fascinating. For this assignment I decided to do an observation. I completed my observation at Chime preschool, conveniently located on CSUN’s campus. There were eight students, three students were girls and the rest were boys, age’s four to five, at the kindergarten level.

During my observation I observed several aspects of physical development; physical development, motor development, and bladder control. While I was observing I noticed that the girls and boys near the same age were close to the same weight, but they had obvious height dissimilarities due to age differences. The reason there is obvious height differences is due to fast development that occurs all through early childhood. According

Cognitive development is the way the mind matures across someone’s lifespan. Cognitive development involves problem solving, logic, constructing, hypothesizing, sorting, memorizing etc. Cognitive development occurs differently in different children. Some have advanced thinking ability, some are better at logic and some are more visual. I observed children that are in the pre-operational stage. During the pre-operational stage, the child collects experiences and persistently mingles with their environment. The child’s experiences create images in their mind. The child starts identifying symbols and attempts to identify their meanings. The child’s memory begins to mature and the child starts becoming imaginative. According to Renee Baillargeon (2004, 89), “Everyday experiences—for example, crying and then being picked up or waving a toy and then hearing it rattle—provide opportunities for infants to learn about cause and effect. This knowledge helps infants better understand the properties of objects, the patterns of human behavior, and the relationship between events and the consequences. Through developing an understanding of cause and effect, infants build their abilities to solve problems, to make predictions, and to understand the impact of their behavior on others.” During my observation I watched the teacher read to the children. The book was about the alphabet. When some of the children saw the first letter of their name they would shout it out to the teacher. The teacher would encourage the behavior and would respond back to the child in a positive tone. I thought this was a great example of what a child’s mind is like in the pre-operational stage. During my observation I noticed another example of cognitive development. A little girls was washing her hands outside and she was singing the theme of SpongeBob Squarepants. Her teacher asked why she’s singing that song and she