When I got to the daycare, children were sitting on the carpet square listening to a Chinese lady guest reading them a book about Chinese New Year. Peter as usual was sitting (not really sitting, moving his body around, and sometimes lying) in the first row listening carefully to the story and being engaged in it by giving comments about the pictures and answering the questions. When the guest asked the children to tell about their animal of the year in which they were born (the book was about Chinese New Year 2015 animal), Peter quickly raised his hand and answered that “mine is cow”. I checked it later at home since I knew his birth year and he was correct. He also claimed that he knew his mom and dad’s animals but I do not know if they were really correct. When the reader asked them to make the notices of animal pictured in the book, Peter eagerly made notices and seemed interested in doing this activity.
After reading the book, the guest provided each child with a fold triangle shaped paper and asked them to cut the fold papers with scissors on the drawn marks to get a beautiful snow flake out of the paper. Children were asked to go to the tables to make their craft. Peter quickly ran to the table and took the scissors and started cutting the paper on the assigned mark. While his friends and other classmates constantly got help from the teachers to make sure which line they should cut the paper, Peter carefully but quickly cut the pattern out of the paper with no help from teachers. He was the first one to cut the paper and opened it as a snow flake. When he made his snow flake, the teacher applauded him but he seemed serious and indifference to her applauds. It was interesting to see how other children after making their snowflakes, show others their work and said “I did it” or “look at my snow flake”, but Peter despite being the first person who made the snowflake, did not show or say other about his work. The first thing he did, he just showed it to her teacher and then put it away. Instead he was mostly interested in playing with remaining of papers from snow flake craft that he discovered looking like a bird and pretending as it was flying. He said his friends and teachers that those papers looked like a bird and truly it was! His friends also started playing with those papers looking like birds.
In free play time, the teacher asked students to choose their preferred toy to play. Peter with three other boys chose Leggo to play with. They started individually building things. Among all of them building simple construction, Peter did a great job in making a big and sophisticated truck using many different Leggo pieces in the best shape. I was so impressed with his creativity, imagination, and complexity in the use of different parts and shapes. He was so quick in making the pattern, changing it and choosing the appropriate parts for his instructon. He seemed very professional in doing that. After fifteen minutes that the bell rang for other activity, he started whining quietly that he wanted to continue his construction.
In the music time, children had their music teacher singing and playing song about Chinese New Year. While all children were dancing and making moves, Peter seemed uninterested and bored standing at one spot scratching his head and looking around. The music teacher distributed scarves to each child to dance with according to the song emphasizing not playing with scarves. While other students followed the teacher’s moves carefully and move gently the scarf and danced with, Peter was harshly hitting the scarf as a whip to his friend next to him and encouraged to keep doing that when he saw his friend laughing at him friend and responding the same thing to him. After several warnings and giving frowns, the teacher changed Peter’s place and took him next to herself separated form others. Peter did not seem regretful at all and continued playing by himself with the scarf through stuffing it under his shirt on his tummy pretending having a baby!