final applied project (1)
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University of Florida *
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Course
3110
Subject
Health Science
Date
Dec 6, 2023
Type
Pages
7
Uploaded by ConstableFog3120
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Final Applied Project: Development in Preschool Age Children
Sydney Trivison
College of Education, University of Florida
EDF3110: Human Growth and Development
Kozlowski
November 29, 2022
2
From ages two to six, children undergo important physical and cognitive changes.
Working with children in this age range provides good insight into how children grow and
develop.
Baby Gator cares for children as young as six weeks and as old as five years and they
focus on allowing children to explore the environment around them and to find a love for their
education.
This is one of the main reasons why I chose Baby Gator as my volunteer program.
Originally, I wanted to volunteer with the youngest age group, but when I was placed in the
Rainbow Room, I was excited to interact with an older age group.
The children in the Rainbow
Room were four years old and at 3:30 when I would show up to volunteer, they would be having
free play outside.
This time allowed me to be a part of their make-believe play and also allowed
me to observe how they interacted with each other.
Being with this age group, it was very clear to see how they fit into Piaget’s
preoperational stage of development.
When the children would be outside playing, each child
would create their own scenarios for what they were doing.
The three girls in the class, Evie,
Jessica, and Allie, would play family together and Jessica was always the cat.
This game
continued every time I visited and the roles that each girl played always stayed the same.
One
group of boys played on a jungle gym dome every day and on some days they would turn it into
different vehicles.
The first week I visited, they decided it was a spaceship and they had
designated each person a job in the spaceship. With these two groups of children, each one used
their imagination to have a more complex scenario for make-believe play.
This was something
that I observed as well as participated in.
Since the children had made their own rules and roles
for their scenarios, they would tell me about how their games worked and what was happening in
each moment.
These make-believe games also revealed their social dynamics where children
who were not initially a part of the scenario would only be allowed to join it if they were
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considered a “best friend” by one of the other children.
This happened many times when Evie,
Jessica, and Allie would be playing and one of the boys would want to join.
Evie tended to be
the leader of the group, she would decide who could join their game or if they would start
playing a different game.
This relates back to how children of this age build friendships. Since
these children were all 4 years old, their friendships started with who they played games with
and then grew based on how often they played together.
Evie and Jessica would always play
together and I was told by the other teachers that they had met in their classroom at Baby Gator
when they were 2 years old and have played together every day since then.
Even though Evie
was an outgoing and social child and Jessica was more reserved.
Another concept that was discussed in class that I also observed at Baby Gator was the
emotional understanding of children in early childhood.
These children showed both empathy as
well as sympathy.
One week, one of the boys, Jeffery, came over, very upset, to where me and
one of the teachers were helping clean up and told us that Evie and Allie were being mean to his
friend, John.
The teacher asked if they were being mean to him as well since he was so upset
when he came over to us, but he told us that they were not being mean to him.
We looked over
at where John was playing and he was running around and laughing with Evie and Allie.
Once
Jeffery was able to tell us what had happened, we realized that he had been upset for John even
though John was not upset by the situation.
In this scenario, Jeffery was showing empathy for
his friend.
These children also have very strong emotions of sympathy. Some of the boys had a
tendency to play rougher than the others and this often did not end well.
In one game that they
boys would all play, they would have sword fights with a pair of shovels.
The game would
always start out tame, but it would usually end with the shovels being swung around and
someone being hit by one of them.
When this would happen, the teacher would go over to the
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boys and help them have a conversation about what had happened.
Instead of taking away the
toys or scolding them, the teacher would ask whoever was hurt what had happened and then
would prompt the child who swung the toy to ask if they were okay.
When the child would ask
if the other child was hurt, they would apologize for hitting them and would usually ask them to
start a new game.
Showing sympathy for a hurt friend was something that these children did
very often.
This happened specifically when John and Henry were playing together and Henry’s
shovel hit John’s hand.
John started crying and when Henry saw his teacher coming over, he
realized that he had hurt John and he started to apologize to him and asked if he was okay.
Once
John told Henry that he had hurt his hand, Henry asked John what game he wanted to play
instead and then asked if he could continue playing with him. These children have learned that
when they do something that hurts someone else, that they have to take responsibility and help
their friend become less upset.
In terms of aggression, most of the children did not show violent behavior, but there
were a handful of children that did.
One of the make believe games that some of the boys would
play involved guns and they would run around the playground using their pretend guns on the
other children.
While this game was not physically violent in theory, it often ended with the
children pulling on each other or pushing each other to the ground.
When this behavior would
occur, the children would be told to sit at the picnic tables and then were told that they could play
a different game once they had calmed their bodies. The children reacted very well to this as a
form of punishment since it gave them some control over their actions but also required them to
think about their actions. This punishment worked more often than not and when the children
decided they were ready to play again, the games were more relaxed and less intense than the
original game. The aggression shown during make believe play was usually displayed by the
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boys as opposed to the girls. This can be attributed to the types of games being played. The boys
tended to play more physical, competitive games, whereas the girls played games where
everyone had a noncompeting role.
With this gender dynamic, there were some children who did
not necessarily fit the mold.
One of the boys, James, kept to himself and would usually draw in
the sandbox or sit over by the trees and watch the other kids play.
Evie, Jessica, and Allie would
often go over to him and ask if he wanted to play with them since he did not play rough like the
other boys did. There were a few times that James would decide to get up and go play with the
girls, but more often than not, he would stay where he was and continue playing in the sand or in
the trees.
In terms of the games that the children would play, the gender differences were very
apparent. The boys would play in large groups and would typically play games that involved
competing and had some form of a winner in the end, while the girls would play games that
involved creating a scenario together and playing specific roles.
It was very common to see the
boys running around the playground and to see the girls sitting off to the side playing their games
quietly.
A loose example of gender schema theory that I noticed on the playground at Baby
Gator was that the girls would not play on the jungle gym and one day when I asked why they
never played on it, Evie told me that only the boys play on the jungle gym.
Since being on the
jungle gym involved climbing and more physical activity than the girls usually did during free
play, they began to associate the jungle gym as a masculine setting that was only for the boys in
the class to use.
These gender schemas were also shown when the children would go back into
the room to wait to be picked up.
The children would have story time or dance time and then
they would be allowed to use different centers in the room. The center that the girls tended to use
was the art center where they could color and paint. The center that the boys would usually use
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was the toy center that had toy cars and tool boxes.
Since arts and crafts are typically seen as a
more feminine activity, the girls would gravitate towards that and since cars and construction are
seen as more masculine, the boys would play with those instead.
Overall, volunteering at Baby Gator was a very effective way to have hands-on
experience understanding how a child in early childhood develops and functions in free play
settings. Being with the age group that I was with gave me a unique perspective since they are
still in Piaget’s preoperational stage, but they are beginning to transition into the concrete
operational stage. The importance of make-believe play was expressed heavily in our class, and
watching a group of four year olds create their own games and rules helped to show that the
older that children become, the more complex their make-believe play is. These children relied
heavily on the stereotypes that they had created when deciding what to play with or who to play
with, but never excluded anyone because they were all friends. Being in a class together helped
each child to make “best friends”, but each child considered every other child in the room to be
one of their friends. This social dynamic is to be expected in this age group since they build
friendships based on proximity as well as who they play with. With the topic of stereotypes,
gender schemas were very apparent in their free-play as well as in the classroom. The boys
played more aggressively than the girls did, so it naturally segregated them into gender focused
groups. These children also showed immense empathy and emotional connections to each other.
Even though their friendships were built because of how often they saw each other, the children
would always give their friends hugs when they would get picked up at the end of the day. They
also showed how much they cared for their friends when they would apologize when they were
playing too rough. Being with such a tight knit room of four year olds was an experience that I
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had not had before and being in this class simultaneously allowed me to pick up on certain
interactions that I may not have noticed before.