Head Start Reflection

Gretchen Kempf
The University of Scranton










On March 27
th
, 2014, I visited the Head Start program in North Scranton. After talking
with teacher Joan OMalley, I was able to identify a 3-year-old boy who was developmentally
needy. This particular student, Tristan, would be returning to Head Start the following year, but
had already been evaluated for school services to assist with his developmental needs.
When evaluating Tristan on the Test of Playfulness, I immediately recognized a
difference between him and his fellow schoolmates. Tristan had a hard time communicating
with others while he played. The other students would laugh and talk together but Tristan never
offered much input into the conversation. One student asked him a question while both students
were playing with Play Dough, and Tristan responded with a gibberish answer. The other
student turned to me and said, he never understands what people say to him. The fact that a 4-
year-old could pick up on Tristans developmental delays was alarming. Tristan also did not
seem to have the same skills as other children when playing with others. Some children
pretended to take on the roles of others such as a fire fighter or a vet, when Tristan did not seem
interested in pretend play. He focused on building with blocks and although he did show signs of
problem solving when his block tower would fall down, other students easily distracted him. At
times, he would stop building with blocks or playing with Play Dough just to stare at other
children. He had a difficult time transitioning from one play activity to the other and actively
resisted all types of structured learning activities; he just wanted to play in his own manner.
I also administered the Get Set for School Check Readiness assessment to Tristan. The
class was missing a substantial amount of students due to a virus, so there were no five-year-olds
present at the time of testing. Tristan was able to identify all six pictured objects and named all
but two of the colors correctly. He was able to pick out an orange crayon and a red crayon to use
for the coloring activity, but he held the crayons at the very top when trying to color. This
caused his lines to be very light and he had trouble controlling the placement of the point of the
crayon on the paper. He failed to stay on task for significant periods of time and would start
making colored lines in different boxes. Tristan scored quite poorly on the tracing and copying
sections of the assessment. These low scores may be partially attributable to his young age, but
his pencil grip had a substantial impact on his performance in these sections of the assessment.
He held the pencil by the pencil-tip eraser and, similar to his performance with the crayon, had
trouble controlling the direction of the pencil tip on the paper. His lines were very light since his
grip left him unable to apply the necessary pressure. Tristan drew Batman for the next part of
the evaluation. His Batman was merely a large scribble and lacked a head, eyes, nose, mouth,
ears, hair, body, arms, hands, legs, and feet. When asked to point out the different features of
Batman, Tristan would point to different areas of the scribble and claim they were the requested
feature. Identifying numbers and letters, on the other hand, appeared to be an easy task for
Tristan. He answered 100% of the assessment questions correctly and when asked to identify the
letter T he went on to declare, T for me! When I asked Tristan to write his name, he drew
several vertical and horizontal straight lines and then told me that he did not know how to make a
T.
In summary, Tristan is a good candidate for the provision of extra services designed to
meet his developmental needs. These services would function to enhance his social ability, his
fine motor skills and his comprehension of and participation in social conversation. Tristan
appears to be quite intelligent and shows great potential for catching up developmentally with his
classmates.