Early Childhood Observation Essay

Colette Tayler (2015) describes the first eight years of a child’s life as years of
“extraordinary developmental growth and of promise regarding human potential and opportunity” (p. 160). What happens in the first decade of life can set the foundation for learning, health, and behavior in the future (Tayler, 2015). The developmental strides they make in the first years set who they become to the world in the future (Tayler, 2015). The first few years of a child’s life are ones of great accomplishment in every developmental field, and as such there are many things future counselors can learn from observing children.
During my observation at Coolidge Park, I witnessed children from many different developmental stages. Children ranged from toddlerhood
While Newman and Newman
(2015) discuss that imitation is primarily applied to toddlerhood, it could work for elementary school students as well.
As school counselors, we spend time during our day teaching guidance lessons to students. In these lesson, modeling and imitation can be very useful tools as they can teach children how to identify positive behaviors. An example of a lesson plan that includes imitating and modeling could be a lesson that teaches elementary school students how to ask others for help. The counselor may model the behavior, and show students how they can ask their peers if they can play together at recess or borrow a crayon, and the child can imitate the behavior as the counselor showed them. From this, children see the appropriate behavior and would likely repeat it in the future.
Counselors can learn many things from every aspect of child development. Future counselors can learn many techniques, strategies, and interventions from understanding how children develop. For school counselors it is important to understand how children develop in order to find the best ways to help them grow. Early development is particularly crucial, and it