Observation of Early Childhood Development

For my case study of early childhood, I chose Jhena Brown, a girl of 2 years old being in her home with her family. She goes to day care 5 days a week. She is home by 5 o'clock every night. She plays with toys and watches cartoons in the living room where she has all her toys that a 2 year old could have to play with. She has enough toys to keep her occupied for the year.

Development through the Lifespan, describes the physical development early childhood as a slower pattern growth. Jhena is about 38 inches tall, and about 40lbs. She has long legs and upper body extremities, with little body fat. The text describes Jhena's body proportion as streamlined, similar to those of adults. It also describes brain development increasing from 70 to 90 percent of adult weight. As brain activity continues to develop, early childhood promotes a variety of skills such as physical coordination, perception, attention, memory , language, logical thinking, and imagination. In the first hour of observing Jhena, she is viewed as a very shy child. When her mother finishes fixing her breakfast, she leaps off her tricycle and begins to hop on one foot in excitation that her food is now ready.

According to Piaget, Jhena is in the pre-operational stage. During this stage children try to make sense of the world. They test thoughts with reality on a daily basis and do not appear to be able to learn from generalizations made by adults. While Jhena was sitting at the table beginning to eat, her mother told her that her bowel of grits were hot and she needed to wait for them to cool off. Jhena decided to test out whether the grits were really hot or not despite of ...