I observed a student at Hill Forest School in GA, the observation took place on 2/20/2014; it was done at 12:00pm. The development stage that I observe was childhood. I notice that the kids in the class were all on different levels. There was a student that was experiencing some transitional period; I have changed his name to Mark. I observed Mark in his fourth grade classroom during a science lesson Mark is an intelligent ten year old child, but he has a difficult time paying attention to his teacher. He likes to get a lot of attention and when he gets bored he turns his focus to other destructive matters, such as, throwing pencils up into the ceiling. Throwing pencils in the ceiling has gotten him in trouble many times, and once he was kicked out of the classroom for it. When he becomes uninterested he stops paying attention to instruction completely. When he is bored, he needs to find another activity to fill the void, and that activity will be something that distracts the teacher and his classmate’s two characteristics that make it interesting and entertaining to him.
From my observations, I believe Mark’s behavior problems are the result of a lack of attention and disinterest from the people in his life, and a general sense of laziness and intimidation for tasks that seem difficult. Mark comes to school with unclean appearance dirty clothes, messy hair, looking like he has not bathed and without the proper tools to actively complete his assignments. For example, he comes to school without any pencils or and his backpack is a mess of old crumpled. Mark’s behavior problems decreased as his teacher had time to give him one on one attention and break down his tasks into smaller assignments while giving him encouragement to complete what he had in front of him.