Methods Practice Assignment 2

For my second methods practice assignment, I decided to do 45 minutes of observation in a kindergarten classroom, focusing primarily on teacher-student interaction. The reason I chose this is because my observations in the field will be focusing on parenting, and I wanted to get a little experience observing adult and child interactions. It was very enjoyable, and because they have an observation booth set up, the kids and adults are in their natural school environment and act naturally.

After beginning my observations, I decided that I could learn more about the children if I observed their interactions with one another because they were doing that much more frequently than interacting with a teacher. My observations are as follows:
*Note: children and teachers are either referred to as "kid" "child" "teacher" etc, or have names that have been changed.

• Billy headbutts Jimmy
• Sally ties scarf to Billy's leg and walks him like a dog. Billy pretends to be a dog by crawling on hands and knees
• Sally asks her teacher: "Is he bigger than you?" referring to her brother
• Girl: My sister's married. And I am too
• Little girl throws rice
• "How come you're drawing a stick first?" - little girl asks boy why he is drawing a person in that order
• kids are singing "we will, we will rock you"
• billy jumps over an imaginary pool
• Jimmy eats out of an empty play bowl "I ate it alllll up!!!!"
• Kid picks his nose
• KId puts his clothespin on the playhouse and says "look teacher, someone put that up there"
• Same kid as above tells another girl that she can't have real ice-cream or else she'll get sick.
• Same kid kicks over toys while teacher is picking them up
• Girl to teacher "are you a kid?"
• Boy: "I have two transformers. A number 1 transformer and a number 2 transformer."
• Kids: "We promise not to talk to each other"
• Teacher: "lips zipped shut" kids: "zip! zip! zip!"
• Kids count to 19. Luke can say that a one and a nine together makes a 19.
• Another kids suggests that they put the 9 first and then the 1
• Jane knows who is absent.
• Teacher points to number chart and some kids get confused between 8 and 9
• When counting down, after reaching one, many kids shout "blastoff!!!"
• Everyone jumps during the "letter sound" song but one girl stands still
• One boy takes the opportunity to hit others "on accident" when they're punching in the letter dance/song. (This is a song that the kids pretend to be doing kick-boxing areobics and punch when they say things like "A says 'Ah' B says 'buh' etc"
• Teacher: 'This is a great story." Boy asks "is it your favorite story?"
• Boy washes his hands in about 2 seconds because he doesn't want to miss the story
• Teacher asks: Why did the princess not marry the prince (paperbag princess)
• One kid- the princess was too dirty to marry him
• another- princess liked the dragon because the dragon was nice to her
• Teacher: "you get to make your own paper bag vest today!" kid'- "I'm not going to make one."
• Teacher's nametag say "miss becca" but children either call her "teacher" or "sister becca"
• Girl is very precise about cutting exactly along a line drawn for her to cut along. It takes her a lot longer to cut than the other kids. Another kid cuts very fast and doesn't pay much attention to lines. Little boy gets very distressed about how hard the task is and he's behind. He stops trying and just watches other kids.
• Kid puts on his vest and starts yelling "to the rescue!!! to the rescue, super vest boy!!"
• Teacher playingly tosses a small crumpled piece of paper bag. Boy throws it back, seeing this as an acceptation to the rules of no throwing

Something I noticed in my observations is that the children react very differently to the same teaching strategies or same learning activities. Every child has a different temperament, and act accordingly. This comes into play in my project because of the "goodness of fit" principle, where a child has a specific temperament, and the parent may need to change from child to child their parenting style and techniques to better fit the temperament of their child. At least this is something that has been taught to me here in schooling in the U.S. specifically BYU, and this may be different abroad because of the cultural and religious differences. It will by interesting to see if the parents have a similar principle of this "goodness of fit" principle and if their parenting varies from child to child. This will be something I will need to find families of more than one child, preferably even having at least 2 of the same gender child, to see if they change not only cross-gender but also from child to child.