April Rice FHS-1500-online 2/8/14 Observation 1

For this observation I went to the Eccles Lab School to observe in their two year old class. The classroom has several stations of activities, such as painting, blocks, water toys, and toys. There were about ten kids and about six teachers working with the kids. The child that I observed was a girl named Lucy. Lucy was average height and weight with the other children in her class, she walked in much the same way as the others and her larger motor skills were on the same lever with her peers, however, her fine motor skills appeared to be more developed than the other childrens. When I first came in, Lucy was playing with Play-Doh with three of the other children in the class. I noticed that Lucy was making her own shapes while the other children repeatedly would go to the instructor for help making their dough into shapes like circles and snakes. She was even making more complicated things like pizza with small toppings, which she used scissors to cut. The others using the scissors on their dough were holding them incorrectly and had difficulty using them. This is evidence that everyone develops their fine motor skills at different rates and Lucy was developing these skills quicker than her peers. (Berger, p.170)

Lucy was very easy to observe as she had higher perseveration that the other children in the class. She tended to stick to one activity longer even when her peers were coming and going on the same activities. One of Piagets four limitations of logical thinking is the concept of irreversibility. (Berger, p.182) As I was observing, I noticed that several of the children in the class had this limitation on their logical thinking but, Lucy showed fewer signs of this limitation. While she was playing with the Play-Doh she used the same piece of dough and made several shapes. She would make a circle then convert it into a snake then back into a circle. The text book says that children Lucys age play best with peers (Berger, p.212). Lucy, however, did not play with her peers much at all. Instead she showed parallel play, or playing around her peers in similar ways but not with them. She was quiet and didnt talk much with her peers even when they were around her doing the same things that she was. At one point, a boy took the Play-Doh that Lucy was playing with. The boy showed instrumental aggression, but Lucy did not show the expected reactive aggression showing that she had more emotional control and she was further developed in that way than her peers (Berger, p.226).