Childhood Observation Essay

In eleventh grade, my AVID teacher Mrs. Jara assigned the class to complete a learning service project, in which one was to give back to the community by completing twenty hours of volunteer hours. At first, I was stumped of how I could give back to Stockton, my community, in a meaningful way since this city was impoverished and filled with crime. Thinking back to my previous research paper on poverty, I remembered that education was the key in determining whether one was living below or above the poverty threshold. At my educational level, I decided to assist toddlers early in their educational career, and thus, I volunteered at the Hazel Hill Child Development Center at San Joaquin Delta College for my service learning project. Exceeding
According to Janet Hopson’s article, “Infant Intelligentsia: Can Babies Learn to Read? And Should They?” (2012), “In the first three years of life, a child of welfare parents hears 974 different words in daily conversation (9.6 million total), the working-class [parent’s] child [hears] 1,498 [words] (19.5 million total), and the child with professional parents [hear] 2,176 [words] (33.6 million overall).” As a result of the disparity among these three classes, the children of welfare parents struggle in preschool while children professional parents learn with less difficulty, since their parents expose them to a larger vocabulary. Therefore, the children of lower socioeconomic families perform worse in their early education, and a difficult start in a child’s education prompts lower performance in school, even throughout his or her high school years as stated in E. N. Junn and C. J. Boyatzis’s book, Annual Editions: Child Growth and Development