Pre-K Observation

I observed in the preschool class for two hours, there were a total of 12 children in the class Most of the kids that are in the preschool class were four years old, but there was one five year old. When I first arrived at the preschool, the kids seemed very shy towards me and they did not seem like they were very sociable. I was a stranger to them, and I would have to guess that all of the children were experiencing a little bit of stranger anxiety. I talked to the teacher about how the children reacted to all “strangers” She said that the children often become very uneasy. As I sat down to observe the children, I noticed one thing right away. The boys in the group were very wild and rambunctious, and the girls seemed to be shy and reserved. The boys tend to be more outgoing, and girls tend to be more reserved. In this class there were various stuffed animals, and I also noticed that the children that I observed had a lot of stuffed animals that they were playing with. The teacher said that she often has puppet shows and the kids love it. I noticed one child was sitting at the table having a conversation with a stuffed beaver. The two twin girls I was observing had a giant stuffed bee; one of the girls would chase after the other with it and pretend to sting them. This shows animistic thinking. This kind of thinking is the belief that inanimate objects are alive. The teacher called all the children over to have story time. The story that she read was about a leprechaun. When the teacher asked where leprechauns lived, one child replied that, “leprechauns live in the grass and run around from tree to tree, they are itsy bitsy and very hard to see.” These children believed that these creatures were real, but they just could not see them. But, the fun with the leprechauns had just begun. To test the children’s belief in the unrealistic, the teacher had the kids make little pots, and then told all of the kids that if they were good, the leprechaun would leave them