Child Observation Paper

Introduction Family reunions are always a great gathering to spend time with a bunch of family members that you rarely get to see or only see on Christmas and Easter, especially when you are a college student in a child development class and have to write an observation paper on a child under three years old. For my observation paper on a child who is under three years old I decided that I would observe my third cousin Jackson Riley Moore. Jackson was born on April fourth, two-thousand twelve. I did my observation on October fifth, which makes Jackson exactly two years six months and a day old. The family reunion was at my grandma Anna’s house, Jackson’s great aunt. I was able to observe him while inside the house and also while playing in

Two of the major theorists that have studied cognitive development are Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Jean Piaget was the first psychologist to study cognitive development. Piaget believed children are born with a basic mental structure on which all learning and knowledge is based. He had a strong emphasis on staging. He divided his theory into four stages but for my observation of Jackson the stage that he fits into was Piaget’s second stage. His second stage is called Preoperational stage. This stage lasts from when the child is two years old and goes until the child is seven years old. In this stage children begin to form concepts and being to reason with the world. Since Jackson is at the beginning side of this stage he has just started to form concepts. While observing him in the living room the telephone rand and he knew where the phone was and what it was and that the ringing meant it had to be

If a child hears certain words repeatedly they tend to use them by imitating. One of the things Jackson has learned to repeat is when he is asked “what does a camel say” he replies “hump day”. This is an example of learning by repeated actions. Jackson is very proud of the things that he does so he makes sure to announce to everyone so they know what he did. When my grandma, Jackson’s uncle Butch, came back from a flag ceremony he was dressed in his uniform and Jackson found this interesting. He ran up to Uncle Butch and asked why he was dressed like that because he didn’t understand why he wasn’t dressed like everyone else that was at the reunion. Children begin to grasp ordinality around two years of age. Ordinality means knowing the order of things, such as three is more than two or knowing the correct order in counting. While counting for hide and seek Jackson knew how to count and the correct way to do it, not missing or skipping any