FSW 245 Miami University Mod 5 Early Childhood Observation Pre Work Paper

Observation Pre-Work

These pre-work assignments are designed to help you manage your time and expectations prior to the completion of the larger observation and analysis assignments. In your pre-work assignment, you will outline your plan or selection for the observation activity. Specifically, please provide the following information in your submission:

1. Selection of people to interview
2. Rationale for your selection (e.g. will it be easy or convenient for you in some way?)
3. Resources you will need (including other people, places, events, or opportunities)
4. Time you anticipate it will take
5. Schedule detailing when you plan to complete the observation activity

For this specific pre-work assignment on Early Childhood, you will be interviewing at least 2 parents from different families about their views on disciplining their children. These interviews may be conducted together or separately, but keep in mind the following pros/cons:

• you may get more honest answers separately since they wouldn’t be influencing each other
• you may start an interesting dialog between the parents if you interview together

Interview questions can be found within Module 5: Early Childhood Observation & Analysis itself.

Assignment Information & Reminders

As part of this course, you will be completing some assignments in the form of direct child observation, caregiver observation, and/or community activities/interviews. You will then use these observations along with course resources to complete 3 assignments for this course. These assignments are essential to understanding how the concepts we learn in this course apply to the real world.

Course Objectives

These assignments are organized to help you address all 5 of our course objectives.

1. Classify the physical, emotional, cultural, social and cognitive characteristics of children within various general stages of development spanning conception through middle childhood.
2. Examine the complex relationship between biological and environmental factors (including culture) and their impacts on the development of children, the learning process, and developmental parenting dynamics.
3. Apply major theoretical models, historical perspectives, and social and legal components that organize our understanding of child development and parenting norms.
4. Generate observations, records and reports of information on similarities and differences in development patterns and behaviors of children.
5. Contribute meaningfully to discourse/debate about challenges and solutions currently facing families in our world.