A Preschool Observation - Essay Example

Once, I took my younger brother and sister to a daycare center called kinder care. It had a very warm and cozy environment ideal for the play activities arranged for young kids. There were around 30 kids, one supervisor, and two attendants. There were many sorts of play activities available for the kids such as playing with dough, coloring, trading, jigsaw puzzles, toy slides and swings, and many more. Kids could choose whichever activity they wanted to get themselves occupied with. There was a pretend kitchen which was the main focus of the preschool.

It contained a toy stove and toy cooking utensils which the children loved to play with. The stove was made out of a big box overturned with knobs and burners marked on it by a marker. Healthful toy food was also available with the main purpose of teaching the children good eating habits and they were observed playing with their toy food with great excitement and fun. Apparatus was available in the kitchen to wash and sterilize the toy food as the preschoolers put the food in their mouths. Moreover, table and chair sets were there for the kids to use.

There were maps, colorful carpets, tiny sofas, bright pictures, funny toys like baby dolls, and a baby calendar hanging on the wall. Kids, including my brother and sister, were using all these as their pretend play. They set the tables and chairs, served each other lunch using toy food, and played chefs. Their sense of creativity was astonishing. There was also some toy cleaning equipment like toy brooms and mops so as to develop a sense of cleanliness in the preschoolers. The supervisor was constantly supervising the kids with active participation in their play activities.

She introduced me to the kids who then surrounded me and started asking me different questions. They dragged me to their pretend kitchen and offered me breakfast. They showed me their artwork and introduced their little pet, a goldfish. While the supervisor was reading a book, the kids started raising their hands and talked about things of their own interests. I heard one of them saying that his mama was going to have a baby boy. Another told that her grandma was going to pick him up that day.

That was all so creative which enhanced the children’s learning. The attendants were also participating in the play activities and keeping an eye on the children so that none of them got hurt. The young kid I observed keenly was a 3-year-old, Joey. As far as his physical characteristics are concerned, he seemed to be really small for his age as he was very skinny and fragile, with an innocent yet bright look on his face. He interacted with me by showing me his artwork and things like a little pillow, from which I assumed that he was a social child.

Yet I observed that he most often played quietly by himself. Perhaps, the reason for this was that his peers found it hard to understand him because he was slow in speech and could not deliver proper sentences. This made him frustrated enough to play all by himself. I asked him his name but he could not tell it properly. He pointed at his female attendant’s nail polish and said, “that is pink” instead of ‘that is pink’. He showed me a banana and pronounced it like ‘bana’.

Then he showed me a tissue and said it was ‘shop’. After a while, he brought a colorful picture of people and asked me, “who?” then he went to his teacher and asked her the same thing. He played with colors most of the time but, to my amusement, he did not look at the paper while coloring and was not even holding the crayons properly.