During your 5 hours of observation in an infant/toddler classroom, serving children from 0-3 years old, you are to observe examples of topics you are learning about in your course. There will be times that you may need to assist caregivers or children, and this will be equally beneficial for advancing your observation/critical thinking skills in reference to your classroom experience with infants and toddlers.
Below is a list of many areas related to the classroom physical environment and the communication between teachers, children and the children’s’ families, developmental milestones and topics related to curriculum.
Directly following observations in the classroom, find the opportunity to take notes on each area. When you have more time, evaluate what you observed and relate it to posted resources and to the information that you have read in the text.
*For Journal Entry 2 you will need to have completed all 5 hours of observation. Choose from the following two sections for your essay topics and then write a narrative essay that includes an evaluation of your classroom observations, citing the text at least 4 times, for support:
II. Young Children’s’ Behaviors/Developmental Milestones, birth – age 3
a. Demonstration of cognitive developmental level. Provide examples.
b. Demonstration of language development. Provide examples.
c. Demonstrations of emotional and social skills. Provide examples.
d. Demonstration of physical development, both small and gross motor behaviors. Provide examples.
e. Focus on one or two children that seem atypical to you. Describe characteristics that seem “out of the ordinary.”
f. Observe students who are involved in “parallel play”, those that play alone or interact with one another. Describe some “play” that you see.
III. Curriculum
a. What materials help to promote the development of children in all developmental areas? (Cognitive, Language, Emotional/Social/Physical) List examples for each.
b. How do the teachers themselves encourage development in each of the above areas? Provide examples.
c. What activities did you observe that promote the development of children? Describe the activity and list the domains that are addressed.
d. List planned curriculum and unplanned curriculum.
e. List some classroom routines. Are they educational? Describe how. If not, how could the routine be altered to be more educational and encourage greater development of skills.