Observation On Child Development

Upon arrival to the house, I found both children playing with different toys in different parts of the home; the girl being five years old and the boy being three years old. Luckily, their aunt was more than willing to help, and was able to get the children together to start playing. Before I engaged in play with the children, I started out by sitting on the couch just watching them, and then slowly got closer until I was sitting right next to them on the coffee table. I did this so I did not feel like I was forcing myself into their play, as their aunt said the little girl was a little shy when it came to some adults. To everyone’s surprise, she was able to open up to me, and was playing with her aunt and me without any difficulties. Throughout
Capone also provided excellent examples of possible ways to integrate the child’s personal interests into what needs to be targeted for sessions. So, if a child needs to increase their verbal output with regards to nouns, then I could focus on utterances that emphasize the use of nouns as a direct example to the child. Some examples provided: “Brrrr puzzle. Brrrrmmm Car.” If the child needs to focus more on verbs then the language model could be: “push. Slide. Point, push.” This emphasizes the use of the nouns or verbs and can be used later on by also combining the use of both language models as a whole: “Slide puzzle. Car drives. Push Car” The overall goal is to provide the child with an appropriate language model that utilizes their own vocabulary as a base for their
This was something that I was struggling with, as I confused examples of Modeling and Expansion with one another. The main point that I was missing was that expansion builds off of what the child is capable of saying, and modeling is expanding on the topic, not necessarily utilizing the same words the child has in their lexicon. Furthermore, I had realized that I did not demonstrate different moments of self-talk (where I state what I am doing), and had too many examples of VMR. I would assume that this is the main reason that I did not provide enough appropriate language models for the children I was playing with. I was not providing models of what I was doing, “I’m moving the puzzle. I’m banging the puzzle,” and I was also not utilizing enough of what the children were saying to expand upon. Finally I also need to expand upon what is being said to provide models of what can be