A Preschool Class Experience - Paper Example

Introduction

For this essay, an observation of the local preschool class was made for a few hours and the kids that are in that classroom. Majority of the pupils in the preschool class were three-year-old with the only one who was four years old. To be specific, the observation involved helping the teacher babysit three boys, a four-year-old and two three-year-old plus two other three-year-old girls.

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The arrival at the classroom was not as expected and there was a feeling that the entire observation would not materialize. The kids seemed shy and did not even to want to come closer to their visitor. This is typical of a child, and soon they gradually felt comfortable and would start socializing. One valuable lesson learned here was that kids do experience a little bit of stranger anxiety when around new faces though, with time, such feelings disappear. Their teacher would say that when the kids were left there with their parents on the first day, they would cry since they felt uneasy. This is as a result of separation anxiety that even adults experience only that they are too big to cry.

Soon after the kids became comfortable and relaxed, they started playing around while giggling cheerfully. It did not take much time to notice one thing right away. There was a unique pattern of play between the boys and girls. While someone might assume that being in the same environment would make these kids portray similar play patterns, this was not the case. The boys appeared to be somewhat rough, rowdy and disorderly. On the other hand, the girls were a little bit shy, calm and reserved. This would concur with the common knowledge that preschool boys are generally more actives and restless than girls. This is despite the fact that all toddlers like to keep themselves busy by jumping, throwing things and running around.

In the classroom, there was an assortment of toys and stuffed animals that the kids would play around with. However, the kids liked the stuffed animals a lot, and most of them seemed to have their favorite ones. One of the girls had a stuffed doll, and she would carry it around like it is her baby. She would even assume that the stuffed doll was crying and try to talk it to stop crying. At some point, one of the boys with a stuffed tiger would roar and start chasing the other kids around trying to bite them with it. However, the most impressive of all was during the puppet show. The kids seemed to love the show and even laugh at the jokes the teacher was making. From such observations, the concept of animistic thinking became apparent. Animistic thinking is the belief that non-living things are alive as well.

Another form of animistic thinking would be observed when the teachers told these kids a story. The story goes of a man with his jacket on. The wind and sun are in a heated argument to gauge their power on who can make the man remove his jacket. Wind thinks he is more powerful than the sun and the sun believes the same as well. To prove his might, the wind starts to blow strongly in an attempt to remove the man's jacket. However, what happens is that the man keeps holding tight to his jacket. When it's time for the sun to prove his might, he makes the day too hot. Eventually, with the high temperatures, the man removes his jacket. These children were convinced that the sun and wind are real creatures. However, the fun with this animistic thinking was just beginning. To measure these children's belief, their teacher issued them with cards having living and non-living things and asked them if the objects were living or non-living. Among the objects in the picture were clouds of which all the children said was a living thing. Perhaps the story of sun and wind might have influenced these children into such thinking. When asked to give reasons for their thinking, the four-year-old brilliantly mentioned that it is because the clouds can move. To conclude on animistic thinking, it appeared that to these children, movement relates to life.

Besides inanimate thinking, another remarkable observation made on these kids was their language development. During the stay with these children in their classrooms, there were some grammatical problems realized in their speech. The four-year-old was quite good in his language including words and sentence structure. However, the majority of the three-year-olds were struggling with their speech especially prefixes, suffixes, and prepositions. Some of the sentence made by these kids were, "he bited me with the tiger" or "she hitted me on hair" which were hilarious to hear. It can be assumed that these kids were trying to learn past tense and adding 'ed' to some words. However, they still do not know how to do that appropriately yet.

In addition, there was the observation of many imitations among these kids. It appears that the teacher was a model to these kids who imitated much of her actions. At one point, a kid was observed trying to imitate the teacher sitting position who had her legs crossed. Apart from this, there was also one kid that could follow the teacher around even when she was going outside the classroom. One of the girls would try to repeat whatever the teacher was saying all through which was rather annoying. Also, there was imitation between the kids themselves. The four-year-old boy seemed to be copied by other kids perhaps since he was a little bit mature. If he climbed one of the tables, some of the boys and girls would do this as well. If he shifted his attention from the stuffed animals to the toy cars, the boys would do so as well. The assumption here is that imitation is a way that children use to learn about the world. As a result, imitation can be a tool of reinforcing positive behavior in children by having them surrounded by good modes. This from the observation that imitation takes place in the presence of a model.

Conclusion

Overall, it was a great deal spending time at the preschool, and every bit of the experience was eye-opening. It is learned from this experience that kids will be uneasy in the presence of strangers, they have animistic thinking, girls and boys will behave differently and imitation is the mode through which children learn. Knowledge gained from this experience can be crucial in the future understanding of kids at work.