Childcare and Child Observation

Running head: CHILDCARE AND CHILD OBSERVATION
CHILDCARE AND CHILD OBSERVATION
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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CHILDCARE AND CHILD OBSERVATION
Introduction:
One of the most important role of the early year educators in observation of the children
which includes about exploration and learning about the ways, behaviors, weakness and
strengths, likes and dislikes of the child. Effective methods of assessing a child helps the
educators in understand their learning needs and scopes of development and accordingly plan
and work to achieve them (Palaiologou, 2008). Educators need to begin with noting how each
child behaves, reacts to different situations, learns and interact with others. Later they need to use
this information for determining how these can be used in helping to meet developmental needs
and be a smart child. This assignment would be mainly based on observing a child and analysing
his needs and development accordingly.
Background information of the child:
Aryan Singh is an Indian-Asian child who is of 3 years age and presently resides in New
Zealand for three generations. He lives in a loving joint family. He is Hindu by origin. However,
both his parents have been found to be very careful about their child and have helped to infuse
right sets of cultural values and principles that have prevented him to face any issues even
belonging to a minor group in the nation. Both his parents are hard working and his entire family
is well maintained with proper financial security. All the members have contributed in the
holistic development of the child. The educators have also encouraged him to bloom in ways by
which he can achieve all developmental milestones successfully.
Physical development:
The child was found to be quite fit and of leaner structure. He was found to be quite
excited in the physical activities and took huge interest in different games. He engaged himself in

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craft making session as well as communicated well with others during the plays. On observing
the child, several important facts about physical development of the child were noted. Around
the age of three, child begin losing their baby fats as well as chubbiness. The children start
acquiring the leaner as well as more athletic look associated with childhood (Gooch et al., 2016).
Aryan was also found to be quite leaner. Studies opine that child’s trunks and limbs grow longer
and abdominal muscles form that tightens the appearance of the stomach. At the age of around 3,
boys are found to have more muscles than that of the girls. One of the things that were also
observed in Aryan was that his head was slightly larger in proportion to his body. Studies are
indeed of the opinion that the physical proportions of the preschoolers continue to change with
their heads still being disproportionately large but they are less than that of the toddlerhood.
Albert Bandura’s theory of observational learning can well be applied to that of the
learning style of the preschoolers in gross as well as fine motor skill. Gross motor skills include
skills like jumping, running, and turning, skipping, hopping, throwing, dancing and involving the
use of large bodily movements. Fine motor skills on the other hand include drawing, writing as
well as tying shoelaces and mainly involve small bodily movements (Ninio et al., 2018). As the
children grow towards from the age two to that of six, these skills gradually enhance and gets
polished. It was found that Aryan had well developed fine motor skills, where he could
successfully engage in craft sessions, turning pages of the books, engage in plays with small
animal toys, participate in sand plays and many others. Bandura has stated that once children are
biologically capable of learning certain behaviors, they must undertake five important actions to
develop the new skills. These are observing the behaviors in others; forming a mental image of
the behavior, imitate the behavior, practice the behavior as being motivated to repeat the
behavior (Eisenberg et al., 2015). In other words, she tried to mean that children must be ready

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and be provided adequate opportunities so that they feel interested in developing motor skills for
becoming competent at those skills. Aryan was found to be a highly competent observational
learner and with the help of the correct set of opportunities and environment provided by early
year educators, he was able to master his skills both in fine motor skills like painting, drawing,
building sand blocks, making crafts and others. His gross motor skills were also polished where
he participated in running, jumping and other cases like hide and seek games and others.
Cognitive development
The preschool period can be described as the time of rapid growth along a number of
different developmental measures among which one of the most important abilities of the
children is their thinking abilities also called cognition. Studies opine that during this time,
children learn using symbolic thoughts, the hallmarks of which are the language as well as
symbol use and even more advanced pretend plays. Children at this age have been also observed
to exhibit concentration of thought which means that their focus is limited to only one aspect of a
situation of object (Whorral & Cabell, 2016). Memory abilities are also seen to develop during
this time of pre-schooling and children can even show their own ways of categorizing, reasoning
and even problem solving.
Studies have revealed that memories are more easily recalled when the children are
participants in the act rather than being an observer or when something makes a significant
impression (Pellegrini & Galda, 2017). The ability of the children to create mental images or
people or that of different events also helps in facilitating memory. Researchers are of the
opinion that children could be helped in learning for creating and maintaining images with the
help of puzzle play (Arens et al., 2016). Aryan was found to be quite fond of puzzles. He was