Exploring Childhood Reflective

During my time in exploring childhood, I learned several things amongst playing with children. Something’s I learned are how to interact with children, how the baby is made, and some developmental patterns. I also learned that exploring childhood is more than just going to the daycares and planning lessons, you learn social skills, technology skills, and speaking skills. You go through the motions of learning how babies are made and all the way through 5 years of age. Thinking that you just take the baby home and go to the daycares is what I thought it was, and boy was I wrong. I enjoyed this because it made the whole experience so real.

The knowledge and skills I learned that I find the most meaningful and beneficial were the lesson planning, the pregnancy calendar, and the P.I.E.S. The lesson planning will help me succeed in the daycare I’m volunteering in this summer. During the summer I am working at the Kindercare and I will be responsible for planning some of the weekly lessons for the toddlers. If I wouldn’t have had to do these so many times, I wouldn’t know how! The pregnancy calendar will help me in the future to track my pregnancy. I will know what to expect and the milestones that I should be meeting at any given time during the pregnancy. The P.I.E.S will help me the most this summer, as I’m working in the daycare. Knowing what the P.I.E.S are will greatly help me because the lesson plan that they use is very different than the one we use. They focus more on the P.I.E.S than the objective or the actual planning.

I plan on using these skills I learned in exploring child hood in my career that I plan on perusing. Currently I do not know what I want to do but I do know that I want to work with children. Hopefully in the medical field but I’m not sure. As they say, you never know what you’re going to be until you are it. I also plan on using the “types of parenting” notes that we took. I do not want to be an authoritarian parent but I don’t want to be a parent that doesn’t care. I want my kids to know that I do care about what they do and how they do it but I do not want them to not do anything because they think I’m being strict. I want to use my parent “power” for good and not
bad.

Throughout the semester, I have made some good and bad choices but ultimately it doesn’t matter to me because the one objective is to have a family one day and be a good parent. Knowing that I can successfully plan and teach a lesson, know how to discipline and how to know if a pregnancy is going is an amazing thing. This Class taught me a lot and I am so glad that I took it. I will continually use the skills I used and learned in this class. I learned alot!