Preschool Child Observation Report

For my observation paper I visited Hilltop Child Development Center and spent an hour in a preschool classroom. The children were having free time when I arrived. Some were flipping through picture books, others were doing crafts, and one particular boy, was playing with dinosaurs. This boy’s name was Ben and I decided to focus my attention on him. Throughout this hour I took note on his level of social, emotional, and physical development in order to determine his chronological age. Ben was enjoying playing with dinosaurs alone until he got bored and decided to play with the children around him. He rounded up a group of three kids and they all picked up dinosaur puppets and began to play together, pretending that the dinosaurs were real. The children fed them pretend food and Ben even came up with a special “dinosaur voice”. Sawyer (1993) studied the changes that children go through regarding imaginary play and social play with their peers. Up until age …show more content…
Ben played peacefully with the other children until he decided that he wanted the apple that Sabine had. Once he realized he wanted it he grabbed for it, but did not get the apple because quickly Sabine pulled it away. Ben broke out in angry tears but did not respond in violent actions, instead he used his words to express his anger. After a quick talk with his teacher, Ben was able to use his words to ask Sabine if he could play with the apple after she was done. According to Seefeldt and Wasik (2006), four- and five-year-olds begin to move away from using actions to express emotions and start to express their feelings through more socially acceptable ways, such as using their words to express feelings. Ben was a great model of this. He had a small outbreak of a tantrum but it was very concise and he quickly adapted his emotions to be more acceptable by using his words to explain his feelings and then creating a logical solution to his