The purpose of this assignment is to identify the background history of the child that I have chosen to observe, the observation made and the development process of the child. During my time at my first placement which was for three weeks I took observations on a child which I had chosen at random. I took notes and pictures of the child writing about what the child was doing in an environment which the child knew very well. Each observation lasted for about ten to fifteen minutes. I tried not to interrupt the child while playing this meant I was unable to get a lot of pictures of the child as I did not want to distract the child of the task he/she was doing.
I was taking observation both inside and outside the classroom. In each observation that I was making I was able to reflect back to the areas of the curriculum in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). My placement was in Sir John Heron Primary School, I was based in a nursery class, and this was a part time nursery so they had a different class in the morning to the afternoon. In the morning there were twenty three children and in the afternoon there were twenty seven.
During my assignment to respect the confidentially of the child I have chosen to observe I shall be referring to this child as “Child S” and will not be using his/her name in this assignment.
The child I picked to do my observation on was a three year old male, who appeared to be a healthy normal child. He is from a Bengali background and lived in the local area. He lives in the home with grandmother, mother, father and one older brother who is currently at the same school as Child S. Child S also has a younger sister who is only 6 months in age. Child S also lives which his Uncle and Aunt, they have four sons all of their sons are older the Child S and 3 of them go to the same school as him.
My target child was a morning child and so that meant he came in to school at 8:30am. As soon as they came in they would have 30 minutes free flow play and about five minutes to 9’oclock their would be a hand signal which all the kids will follow and they would all start to tidy up and come on to the carpe. They would divide in to two groups the ladybirds and the bumblebees, ‘Child S’ was a bumblebee. This was the first carpet session of the day in which they did mathematics; this was a short session that lasted for twenty minutes. During this session I sat and observed ‘Child S’ there were two main focus of the session the first was being able to subtract the cookies and money in order, the second focus was being able to add on another number in order when singing the diva song. The way the first focus was achieved was by sing the ‘five fat cookies song’
While I was observing ‘Child S’ during this session, he remained very quite while the teacher got out the cookies and money, he joined in with the rest of the class when they were counting up the numbers of cookies that were there. As soon as the cookies were counted the teacher got the money out and the all help to count it while she put the money in to the purse. ‘Child S’ joined in with the counting how ever he was a lot quitter then the other. The teacher first played a game in which she gave the children a number of conies and they had to buy the same amount of cookies with the money. Each cookie cost 1p, when it came to ‘Child S’ turn he was given 2p and was told to go to the backers shop. He looked puzzles when he first went up to the cookies but then the teacher asked him how many pennies did he have and they counted the pennies together after doing so he was able to identify that he needed to buy two cookies. When ‘Child S’ got this right he was given a lot of praise from the teacher and then was told to go and sit back down. After he went and sat back down ‘Child S’ sang in a lower voice and showed a much more positive approach to the rest of the session. He was answering question that were asked to the whole group and tried to be 1st one to do so.