I had the opportunity to observe three different children in order to complete the Piaget and Vygotsky Assessments.

I chose three children with the respective ages of 3, 5, and 8 years old. I assessed certain cognitive abilities for each assessment which included: Classification, One-to-One Correspondence, Conservation of Number, Seriation, Causality, Artificialism, Space, and Time. Due to the different ages I observed, I used materials found in their classrooms in order to complete the assessments. CHILD #1: 3 years old The first child I observed was a three year old little girl. She was in a classroom for two and three year old children. She was a very friendly little girl who was very eager to spend time with me. She did not seem nervous about talking with a new person. I knew right away that this assessment was going to be amusing. I started the assessment by looking at her classification skills. I gave her some people from the classroom dollhouse and asked her to put them into groups. She first separated the people into groups by gender. She then continued, without me even asking, and separated the male and female groups into groups of adults and children. It was interesting to see that she willingly separated the figures into age groups also. Her grouping demonstrated that she was strong in classification. When I assessed the little girl in her one-to-one correspondence skills, I set out some monkey cutouts. I gave her some banana stickers and asked her to give each monkey a banana. She gave most of the monkeys, one banana each. There were two monkeys, however, that she gave two bananas and two monkeys that she gave none. Without having to ask, she quickly told me that two monkeys looked grumpy so she was going to give their bananas to her favorite two

monkeys. Though she did not completely follow my direction, I do believe she does have adequate skills in one-to-one correspondence. When I got down to time, she was being so talkative that I just decided to ask her questions. I asked her how old she was and she volunteered to tell me how old each of her brothers and sisters were. She has two brothers and three sisters, so I thought this was quite impressive of a three year old. I looked at the teacher and she said the girl was right. She mentioned she had a baby sister who was nine months. I asked her when her baby sister was born and she said yesterday. I asked her if she remembered what she did yesterday and she said it was her birthday party. The teacher said this was untrue and that her birthday had been in December. She did not demonstrate a strong comprehension of the concept of time. When I assessed this little girl using the Vygotsky assessment, I noticed her with some of her friends and they were all throwing pillows at each other in the quiet area. The teacher told them that the quiet area was not a place for throwing pillows and they needed to leave the center. As the teacher turned, a boy threw a pillow at the little girl and she asked him to stop. CHILD #2: 5 years old The second child I observed was a five year old girl in a Kindergarten classroom. She was in a classroom of about twenty children. She had a very bubbly personality and seemed to have many friends in her class. She was very open and easy for me to observe and assess. When I told her I was going to have her do some activities with me she seemed excited. As I assessed her in conversation of number, I made a pile of seven crowns and then lined up seven crayons. I asked her which group had more and she responded that both had the same amount. I then arranged three crayons into a triangle and three crayons in a line, end over end. I

asked her which group had less. She told me both groups had three so they were equal. Her correct answers to my questions supported her knowledge of conservation in number. While she was in her social studies lesson, she demonstrated her competence in the cognitive skill of causality. Her teacher asked her if she knew what good thing happened because of the Civil War. She quickly answered her teacher by saying that no one was allowed to have slaves anymore. Her knowledge of this topic and quick response impressed me. More importantly, however, I was able to see that she understood the concept of cause and effect. As the teacher was lining them up for lunch, she commented that they would not be able to go outside to play because of the rain. The little girl I was observing quickly announced that the rain was here to help them clean off the playground. I really found it was refreshing that she was able to think of such a benefit in a situation that would usually be upsetting to small children. The statement showed her artificialism in that it showed me her assumption that natural things in her world were there for people. During the Vygotsky assessment, I noticed that she was struggling with properly making her b and d letters. She told me she wanted to learn how to properly write them. The teacher came over and showed her a trick with her hands on how to keep those two letters different than each other. I noticed her repeating what the teacher had told her as she wrote those letters. CHILD #3: 8 years old The last child I assessed was an eight year old girl in a third grade classroom. She was in a classroom of 23 children. She was a friendly, pleasant girl, but she was shyer than the first two girls I observed. She was very quiet but enjoyable.

I first assessed her on classification. I gave her some cards that had proper or common nouns on them. I asked her to place them into groups and she was able to correctly distinguish between the two different nouns. This activity was useful in showing her competence in classification. During the assessment of her seriation skills, I watched her work on a math worksheet that her teacher had given her. She was supposed to arrange the four digit numbers from least to greatest or greatest to least. She worked through her problems and got many right. I noticed on the ones that she got incorrect, that she had mixed some of the numbers. Her knowledge, however, of seriation was demonstrated overall. Her skills in causality became evident when I questioned her about her chapter book, Bunnicula. She began to tell me events in the book and what happened because of those events. For example, she told me that each night the moonlight would shine over the cage and the bunny would turn into Bunnicula. Her explanations strongly upheld her strength in causality skills. For the Vygotsky observation, she was having trouble writing on brown paper because she writes very small. She wanted to fix her writing because she was scoring less on spelling test because of her writing. Her teacher gave her some smaller lined brown paper to work with. The experience I had while doing the Piaget and Vygotsky observations was a valuable one indeed. I believe both of these assessments can be very helpful to the teacher when looking at certain skills for certain children. As I did the assessments, I found myself seeing the skills without even conducting an activity because I had become more familiar and aware. These observations and use of assessments will be beneficial in my future as an educator.