Reflection On Child Observation Tasks

On 13th of March, I went to kindergarten to complete my child observation task. Ms. Janelle is the person in charge of the kindergarten and she introduces Nic to me. Nic is a 5 years old kid and this year is his 2nd year in the kindergarten. As I went there after their classes, I were told to help Nic with his homework and on the same time complete my task. Nic is a very active child and able to speak fluently in English and Mandarin. He told me that he came from an English speaking family but his grandparents tend to use Mandarin to communicate with him so he is able to learn two languages. Along the communication with Nic, I realized that he is able to handle language very well.
I set my task on language development. There are few theories

He is able to complete the tasks and able to form complete sentences and form sentences that contain 4-5 words. From my observation, I realized that he has very strong ability on forming sentences as he is able to form sentences up to 35 words, much more than an usual 5 years old child. The capability to form sentences relates to Morpho-syntatic development. Children begin to put two, then three and more words together into short sentences at approximately 24 months of age. Children’s first sentences are combinations of content words and often missing grammatical function words and word endings. As they grow older and gradually master the grammar of their language, they become able to produce increasingly long and grammatically complete utterances. The development of complex sentences largely complete by age 4. A research done by Indra Sinka & Christina Schelletter (1998) shown that bilingual children develop faster in morphosyntactic development. Hence, it is not surprise that Nic performs better than the same-age children in this

In order to test his knowledge on position, I hide a pencil in a specific place and he needs to tell me where the pencil is. As he can tell the position of the pencil correctly by using the word “in front” “corner” and “middle”, he has grasped this concept. Moreover, he is able to differentiate the size and able to use the concept of time correctly. According to developmental psychologists, five-years old that can understand concepts such as “above” “below” “more” and “less” and grasp concepts of time has a normal development in this area. (Katerine Lee, 2015). Nonetheless, Nic is able to complete all the tasks in this section mainly because of he need to use it often. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Robert Golinkoff and Justin Harris (Harris, Golinkoff, & Hirsh Pasek, 2011) emphasize the key principles in young children’s language development. Based of the principle, children learn the words and concepts they hear and use most often. This principle explains the reason why Nic is able to complete all the tasks given to him easily. Moreover, throughout the interaction with Nic, I realized that he is able to learn a new concept easily if I taught him the concept through stories. This situation matched exactly to a recent research study of children language development shows kindergarteners can learn complex concepts and handle more intellectual challenges than schools currently throw at them. George Brown Elementary in San Bernadino exposes