A Psychology Paper Describing A Child Observation (Essay Sample)

Child development
Name
Course
Date
The study of children has been a subject of great interest during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Scholars have gathered information about and from children and have used this information to formulate ideas about how children grow and develop. Child development refers to the process through which human beings grow from infancy through to maturity. Observation is important as one can find out what the child is interested in and what motivates them to learn alongside their progress and how they behave in certain situations. Moreover, it identifies if children need assistance either within certain areas of learning or socially. Furthermore the observations check that the child is safe, contented, healthy and developing normally within the classroom or early years setting
In this report, I am going to describe a child observation that I have done in a classroom setting. I got a chance to assist the teacher to take attendance, work with small groups of children to do some assignments given, grade some children's work and to some extent I participated in the practical lessons. I observed a very close teacher-child interaction whereby the teacher was engaging the children by randomly asking them questions. I observed the teacher use learning aids and demonstration materials as well as charts. Use of text book illustrations helped the children to a greater extent to understand clearly what the teacher was teaching.
I interacted with a couple of children inside the classroom and actively participated in the small groups discussions. I observed that the children did well in the discussion and were learning from each other. I learnt that in a classroom setup, children will learn more from their peers more than they can learn from the teacher. Moreover, social learning is not limited to academics only. When children learn together, it helps them develop socially. They learn how to be more independent as well as socialize with their peers.
Family forms a crucial part of everyone's development. A family can determine who you are going to be in future while your family values determine what your relationship with others will be like. For example, if a family is abusive it can emotionally impact on the behaviour of an individual. Through time family values have been changed and lost. Instead of staying and sharing together, families now go on their separate ways. Examples, most families today don't eat dinner together or partake in group activities and therefore a parent will not contribute to the development of her child.
There are several theories that exist in the area of early childhood development which aims to explain how young children grow and learn. A theory is an organized or systematic way of thinking about a particular concept. Some theorists identified with child development focus on growth, some on how learning takes place, and others on both. The term growth usually refers to a sequence of changes or stages that takes place on the way to adulthood and that are controllable. Developmental theories usually explain changes in the child that result from interactions between growth and learning.
In the field of early childhood development, some of the well-known theories of child development are maturationist theory that focuses mainly on maturity and to some extent on environmental influences. Essentially, this theory upholds that children mature as they grow older and their characters and behaviour will be revealed with little influence from the surrounding environment. From ...