Daycare Volunteer Experience I Volunteer Psychology Class Essay

Daycare Volunteer Experience

I volunteer psychology class a day care I write a reflection paper. Time working kids kind an experience. I paper I answer questions.1. In paragraph, explain service learning experience reinforced understanding enhanced learned? Include examples.

Reflection paper: Volunteering at a daycare facility

As part of my work for this psychology class, I chose to volunteer at a local daycare center. I had never worked with children before, so seeing how young children interacted with one another on a daily basis was useful in demonstrating how the concepts I learned about development were reflected in people's everyday experiences. It is very easy to forget the long, sometimes painful process of learning and socialization that is required for a child to enter adulthood. Aspects of normal, social adult relations like sharing, self-censoring, and respect for others are very clearly socially learned and socially located behaviors, as I witnessed when working with children.

Real life situations and experiences

Perhaps the most obvious developmental theory reflected in children's behavior is that of social modeling. Children are very apt to mimic the behavior of adults and their peers. When they see one child playing with a toy in a particular manner, particularly a friend or another child with socially desirable qualities, young observers are often very apt to copy their peer. When other children's negative or positive behaviors are reinforced through praise or even negative attention, fellow students often engage in the same behaviors, seeking social approbation (Ormrod 1999).

Because of the nature of my experience, developmental theories such as Piaget's ideas regarding mass and volume were not directly observable.Most of the activities of the daycare facility were fun, rather than strictly educational (Atherton 2011). However, I did witness some aspects of biologically-oriented developmental theory in my observations. It was immediately obvious that some children were more physically developed than others. Some children could very easily manipulate the more complicated shape, number, and color toys while others struggled. Fine motor skills were clearly more developed in most of the other students, as was strength, coordination, and the ability to run, jump, and play. Volunteering for the class demonstrated how learning is reliant upon biological, social, and psychological influences. I also watched how the teacher tried to draw upon the knowledge of the students when teaching the students basic concepts. When teaching colors, for example, she asked students to name things in their home or on themselves that were red, green, etcetera, or first asked who knew their numbers, letters, and colors, before re-teaching the concepts. This suggested the concept of 'scaffolding' or building upon existing knowledge to teach new concepts. "In the process of scaffolding, the teacher helps the student master a task or concept that the student is initially unable to grasp independently. The teacher offers assistance with only those skills that are beyond the student's capability" (Lipscomb et al. 2004).

Diverse populations

The class was made up of students from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. The theorist Abraham Maslow once noted that children who do not have their….....