Report on Young Child Observation

From the first time I have seen Caveri, the fresh born infant, I was totally falling in love with her. She is my best friend’s baby girl who is a typical Chinese girl who has black eyes and black hair with a chubby face. She definitely has positive characteristic and always has a smile on her face which makes me feel happy every time I see her. I enjoy spending time with her because I can easily connect with this angel. In this observation report, I would observed Caveri’s cognitive, language, and emotional development to gain a better sense of what is developmentally appropriate for a young child at this age.

Cognitive development is the first domain I observed from Caveri. Caveri is a toddler for she is 17 months old which is in the “sensorimotor stage”, “the earliest stage in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. The infant experience the world and gain knowledge through their senses and motor movement. (verywellmind. com)” Indeed over the past few weeks, Caveri having a great improvement on her hand-eye coordination skill, she was able to pick up and grab the objects between the thumb and fore-fingers. She also kept attempting to make a tower by stacking up any toys, blocks, cups, just anything she can reached. This time Caveri was sitting in the booster and playing some of her same sized toy soda cans on the table. She was trying to figure out how to stack up the soda cans one by one with one hand instead of both. The cans tower couldn’t keep up as high as she wants on the first and second attempt. In Piaget’s Theory, “The sensorimotor stage can be divided into six separate sub-stage that are characterized by the development of a new skill. (verywellmind. com)” During the fifth of substage, Caveri has learned how to make the cans stand still from the experience of trial and error experimentation. Eventually, Caveri was able to pick up and stack four soda cans successfully on her fourth attempt. After she completed her stack up mission, its time for her to do her next mission, knock it down. During this observation, I believe in Piaget’s theory “When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself. ” (Jean Piaget). As an educator or parents should try not to be over-involved in child’s play, better leave some rooms for the young child to explore and test the surroundings himself. “Let the child be the scriptwriter, the director and the actor in his own play. ” ~ Magda Gerber

Not only have I observed Caveri’s cognitive development, but also her language development. Caveri is a Chinese American, she is bilingual in Chinese and English. Therefore, she always mixed up two languages when the time she speaks. As I remember, about Caveri’s 11 months old, she began babbling her first word da da. That’s good enough for her daddy to be happy the whole year long and finally saying mi mi (mommy) when she reached 13 months old. After the babbling stage, Caveri is currently in the holophrastic stage, she is able to use single word to express herself by saying “yes/no” “boa” (she is full in Chinese) or “mummum” (she wants some food in Chinese). When the time she was building up her soda cans tower one by one, she was saying “one tuu fee “sai” (four in Chinese)”. She mixed her languages in the same sentence. Base on this observation, she is obviously unable to differentiate the two languages. This situation does brings up some questions in my mind. Is she confused on the languages? Does bilingualism causes speech delay or influence any of her cognitive development? As shown from grounded research “There is currently no empirical evidence to link bilingualism to language delay. Dual language learning does not cause confusion and or language delays in young children. (DeHouwer, 2009; Paradis, et al. , 2011). ) On the other hand, there are many benefits of being bilingual, “studies have shown that bilingual children are more creative and better at planning and solving problems than monolinguals, and even have greater access to people and resouces. These mean that a person will benefit more from his bilingualism (cognitively) if he is more proficient in his languages. ” (4,5)