Assessing Play Behaviors - Non Structured

Over the past several weeks I have been observing one Caucasian male child that is seven-years-old. I have known him for many years due to him being my neighbor. This has allowed me to see the tremendous growth he has had in all aspects of his life. Considering he is in second grade presently, he has not been in school for an extremely lengthy period of time, but he has come to learn the rules of the classroom and of the school. By using the rubric our group has created, I was able to analyze his different learning styles, where he was optimal in learning, and where he needs to work on specific areas.

The classroom is definitely an area in which does not appeal to him whatsoever. He does not have the proper amount of freeness he needs in order to play successfully. He is somewhat confined to the time alloted for play and due to behavioral difficulties, his play becomes even more regulated at certain times. Using Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, it was evident that he excels in spatial and bodily-kinesthetic intelligences. He was without question advanced in both of these areas. Whenever he is able to be physical and use his body to accomplish the rough and tumble play he loves so much, he is able to excel much more then when he is required to use numbers or music. I found that when he was given the opportunity to play in the classroom, his bodily-kinesthetic intelligence flurished when he could use the blocks and materials to build. He is an avid Star Wars fan and due to that, he would build amazing space crafts for the Star Wars characters. The structures were very large and also resembled some of the most difficult ones from the Star Wars movies. This enabled me to see that he can remember a lot of specific details from the areas he enjoys the most. 

In addition, his spatial ability caught me off guard. Like I have previously stated, I have known him for many years so I had a preconceived notion as to what worked for him and what did not. I was pleasantly surprised to see that he can manipulate puzzles extremely easily and work with the more difficult ones when given the chance. He definitely can picture something at one point in time and later replicate it drawing tremendous attention to visual memory. With him, it all depends on if the topic he is working with interests him or not. I think this is why I was so amazed with him. He transformed from being a child that did not want anything to do with the classroom no matter what, to a child that greatly loved certain aspects that caught his attention. By him finding areas to play in the classroom, this spilled over to the content areas. By invoking a positive correlation between free play or "non-structured" school environment and the classroom his curriculum areas also began to excel.

In addition to Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, I also assessed his fine and gross motor skills. He is definitely advanced in all of the fine motor skills in our criterion. This includes building a tower of more than ten blocks, cutting straight and curved lines with scissors, copying images of shapes, and tying his shoes. He had all of these skills mastered awhile ago, so it could just be depending on his age. Also, this aids in my analyzation of his spatial and bodily/kinesthetic intelligences. As for gross motor, during his free play in the non-structured school environment, I was not able to assess the criterion we set forth. The non-structured environment definitely was not large at all for him to play with in the classroom. The only aspect I could assess was the balancing on one foot, which he was advanced with. Again, it could be due to his age, but I was not surprised at all of this because he is constantly standing while doing projects such as building. He enjoys using one foot and then the other. I feel that it somewhat calms him down when he is stressed out. Instead of being loud and somewhat obnoxious, he builds large towers while standing on one foot!.