Head Start ReflectionGretchen KempfThe University of Scranton

On March 27th, 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.