I walk into this building everyday at 2:30 pm. It never seems to change. On the outside, the building is white and the windows have children and musical instruments painted on them. When you walk inside, you see white walls in the hallways but each room is painted a different color. There is the yellow room, blue room, orange room, red room, purple room, and green room. In each room, there is one wall that is painted the color in which the room is called. I work at a daycare and each room is for different age children.
The yellow room is for newborns up to 15 months, the red room is for toddlers 15 months up to 18 months, the orange room is for toddlers 18 months to 2 ½ years, the purple room is for toddlers 2 ½ to 3 years, the green room is for preschoolers 3 to 4 years, and finally the blue room is for preschoolers 4 to 5 years of age.
As a worker, we have to either wear plain shirts with nothing on them, or you can buy shirts with the company logo on them. We can’t wear flip flops or anything open toed. The children can wear whatever they want but they cannot wear flip flops because they could fall easily.
You can always tell which children are attached to what teachers. There are always the children that like to play with other children and don’t like to play with the teachers. In each room you see which children love to play with one another. You can see the little girls already forming groups and not playing with the other girls or boys.
In the blue room, there are two girls that act like whatever they want to do, everyone else will follow them and do the same exact thing. They are very bossy and can be mean to the other kids if they don’t want to play the same thing as them. In the purple room, the children usually go with the flow of the room. Sometimes, that room can be very loud and rambunctious. The children are constantly screaming at the top of their lungs, running around, and dancing. If you tell them to relax, they say okay but then go back to being crazy. In the green room you can see a relationship between the teachers and the children.
There are two teachers in every room. With the older children, like in the blue and green room, there is one teacher per ten children. If there is more than ten children in the room, then there needs to be two teachers. In the purple, orange, and red rooms, there is one teacher per four children. If there are more than four children, then there needs to be two teachers. In the yellow room, with the babies, there is one teacher per three babies. If there are more than three babies, then there needs to be two teachers.
The relationship between the teachers in the yellow room and the babies seems to be that the teachers are more attached to the babies that have been there the longest. There is a baby named Liam and he is almost a year old. He has been going to the daycare since he was four months and has been with the teacher in the yellow room ever since. If she walks out of the room, he starts to cry because he thinks that she will not come back. She is very attached to him too. The days he isn’t in, her mood is different.
The relationship between the teachers in the red room and the toddlers are that the teachers seem to like the toddlers that listen more than the toddlers that seem to do what they want. The relationship between the teachers in the orange room and the toddlers is the same way.
The relationship between the toddlers and the teachers in the orange room seems to be the children that are the nicest to the other children and the ones that get along with everyone. They listen to the teachers and they use the potty when it is time to go.
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Jackie--
ReplyDeleteYou seem to be focusing here on the different levels of attachment between kids and teachers at the daycare, which sounds like it will work fine. As a reader, though, it's a little hard for me to follow all these colors (and I don't get too much else in terms of physical description--what furniture, toys, etc. are in each room, for example?) You may want to simplify to two or three rooms for an essay of this size--maybe infants, toddlers, and preschoolers? Then you would have room to develop each more fully and, I think, readers could follow more easily. That classification of three (say) age groups could provide the basic structure for your paper, which now seems a little rambling.
In terms of details, you tend here to jump to the conclusions without giving me the evidence. What you want in an ethnography are more observations of specific interactions--that three-year-old Monique clinging to the knees of Miss Susie, for example: what did she say and what did the teacher do? (Liam and the two girls who boss everybody around are going in the right direction, but try for more specificity--what exactly did you see/hear the bossy girls do and say, for example?) Does that make sense?
It seems like you have a great opportunity for observation with this subject!