Encouraging Early Development - Essay Example

The preschooler I observed keenly was a 3-year-old, Joey. He was playing an associative play of pretend kitchen with his classmates. He was very excited about the toy stove, cooking utensils, and toy food. He walked around the table and chair sets which were there for the kids to use. Joey held my hand and showed me the maps, colorful carpets, tiny sofas, bright pictures, funny toys like baby dolls, and a baby calendar hanging on the kitchen wall. I saw him setting tables and chairs, serving his friend's lunch using toy food, and playing chef, which showed 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. I asked him his name but he kept on offering me toy food. His sense of creativity was astonishing. When he finished serving the food, he picked up the toy broom and started cleaning the kitchen floor to clear up the mess. An interesting thing I noted about him was that he got bored easily and kept switching from one activity to another. I concluded that he was not consistent, and tried to be social but easily got frustrated when he would discover that others found it hard to understand what he was saying, yet he liked to explore things and occupied himself with activities that interested him.

Jean Paige’s early childhood is the second of the four stages of cognitive development. Children between two and six use preoperational intelligence, language, and imagination, but fail to use logical operations.

Empathy is a child’s response to others’ emotions. Joey showed empathy in that when a child snatched food from another and the latter started crying, Joey went into the kitchen and brought him more food. Egocentrism is the concept when a child thinks that the whole world thinks like him and shares his beliefs, thus engaging himself in monologue dialogues with other preschoolers. Joey kept on showing his pretend kitchen to me while I was asking his name. This showed his egocentrism. Irreversibility refers to the idea that nothing can be undone. It is the inability to recognize that something can sometimes be restored to the way it was before a change occurred. One of Joey’s friends took Joey’s food plate and started eating from it. He got extremely upset by this. Even when the boy tried to give him back his plate he was not ready to accept it. In his mind, things done once could not be reversed. Animistic thinking means perceiving inanimate objects as having real-life features. Joey told me that he will clear up the mess with the broom because the kitchen will start crying otherwise. Centration is focusing on one aspect only ignoring all other aspects. When Joey was setting up tables and chairs, he simply concentrated on the setting and forgot about the food and his friends for a while. Read More