Melissa Moy
FRCD 3213
November 14, 1999
On
November 7, 1999, at 3:30, I went back to the observation booth and watched
Maya again. She is a five-year-old girl
in the kindergarten class. I noticed
that today the area looked slightly different. The teachers had placed kites
around the room and the children helped decorate by drawing pictures to put on
the wall. All the other usual elements
where there. For example, the computer, the couch, and the sandbox where all
still in their place. The children where all playing in different areas of the
room when I first entered. A few where
playing in the sandbox while others where being read some stories, and a few
looked at the books in the back of the classroom.
When I entered the room Maya was playing with something on the wall right in front of me. I could not tell what it was because it was not in view. She used this time to speak to her friend who was playing with her. Soon, a man came in singing and laughing about a snack that some of the children had began eating. Maya laughed at him for a few brief moments and then went back to play with something on the wall. Again I cannot see what exactly they are doing because my view is blocked. Soon one of the teachers walked over to the wall and instructed Maya and her friend to go to the bathroom and wash their hands. They followed her instructions and proceeded to go to the bathroom, laughing and talking the whole way. When they returned the girls sat down and patiently waited for the teacher to give them their snack.
While
eating snack Maya spent the time to observe the other children in the
classroom, including the children at the table with her. She did not say very much, instead she just
watched as the other children talked.
Soon one of the teachers joined the children at the table and began
talking to the girls. Maya’s face lit
up and she began to speak excitedly.
Maya reacted to the children
very well. She listened, followed
instructions, and spoke fluently.
Because it was not easy to hear though the headsets in the observation
booth, I was not able to tell if Maya was speaking in complete sentences but by
the way that the teachers and her peers where reacting to her, it was obvious
that she was speaking coherently. The
other people in the room react with Maya in mutual understanding, rather than
with confusion.
Maya demonstrated
advancement in language development.
She is where she should be in relation to her age. She speaks coherently and in complete
sentences. She was able to convey
thoughts, feelings, and intentions in an organized, culturally patterned
way. The book calls this communication
competence (Hetherington, p 274).
According to learning
theorists, Maya learned this type of communication through positive
reinforcement, where her parents showed approval to sounds that she made so
that she would make them more often (Hetherington, p 276).
