How do Dinosaurs Eat their Food? Book by Jane Yolen

Child’s Name: Micheal Rodriguez (Mickey) Age: 3 Years 

Book Title : How do dinosaurs eat their food? By Book by Jane Yolen 

Observer: _______________________________________________ 

Line No	Speaker	What was said
1	Observer	Okay Mickey, We gonna read a book called ‘how the do dinosaurs eat their food?’ What do you think this book will be about?
2	Mickey	Mh?
3	Observer	What do you think this book about?
4	Mickey	I don’t know
5	Observer	Well it’s going to be about dinosaurs
6	Mickey	Yeah
7	Observer	Yeah and what else
8	Mickey	Pancake
9	Observer	Pancake, You think it is going to be about pancake? Does your mommy makes pancake quite often?
10	Mickey	No
11	Observer	No. How do dinosaurs eat all his food? Does he burp does he belch, or make noises quite rude? Do we talk really loud ?
12	Mickey	No
13	Observer	In the cafeteria when we are eating,
14	Mickey	No
15	Observer	No, Is it that easy making good choices?
16	Mickey	Mmh
17	Observer	No, how does mommy feel
18		Mad
19	Observer	Mad. Does he pick at his cereal and throw down his cup hoping to make someone else pick it up?
20	Mickey	No
21	Observer	No. does he fuss, does he fidget or squirm in his chair?
22	Mickey	No
23	Observer	No. What happens when we mess with our chair?
24	Mickey	They take away
25	Observer	They take away, what happens when we are moving around Mickey and we are moving the chair up and down. What can happen to us? We can,
26	Mickey	We can broke the chair
27	Observer	We can break the chair. We can fall down and get hurt, right?
28	Mickey	Yeah ,
29	Observer	Yeah we don’t wanna get hurt
30	Observer	Does he flip his spaghetti high into the air? Does a dinosaur glare? Oh! what is the dinosaur doing ?
31	Mickey	I don’t know
32	Observer	What’s happening?
33	Mickey	I don’t know
34	Observer	He is picking his spaghetti high in the air.
35	Mickey	Uuhm
36	Observer	Mmmh, what is mommy thinking?
37	Mickey	Oh oh
38	Observer	Like oh oh , What a mess! It is not okay. We gotta keep food on the table on a plate. Right?
39	Mickey	Yeah
40	Observer	Yes. How does a dinosaur eat all his food? Does he spit out his broccoli partially chewed?
41	Mickey	No
42	Observer	Does he bubble his milk?
43	Mickey	No
44	Observer	No, stick beans up his nose?
45	Mickey	No.
46	Observer	Do we put food up in our nose?
47	Mickey	No
48	Observer	No. where do they go?
49	Mickey	In in the…
59	Observer	Where do they go, where do we put our food at? Where does is go
51	Mickey	Mouth
52	Observer	Mouth. In the mouth. Okay, mommy and daddy look very angry. Right?
53	Mickey	Yeah
54	Observer	Does he squeeze big juicy oranges with his big toes? Do we use our toes to squeeze orange juice?
55		No
56	Observer	No
57	Observer	What do we use? Our…?
58	Mickey	Our hands
59	Observer	Our hands. No he says ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. He sips very still. Is the tourist dinosaur making good choices now?
60	Mickey	Yeah
61	Observer	Yeah, he is making good choices. How is mommy’s feeling?
62	Mickey	Happy
63	Observer	Happy. He makes some pancakes right, but he is failing in directions. He eats all before him with smiles and  good will. He tries every new thing at least one small bite. We take small bites, right? So we don’t choke? He makes no loud noises that is not polite. He never drops anything onto the floor and after he has finished, he asks for some more. Eat up, eat up, little dinosaur. And that’s the end of the story Mickey. Thank you

Phonological Knowledge 

The sound that the child pronounced correctly are: /n/, /o/, /p/, /k/,/j/, /t/, /b/,/ tʃ/, /ð/,/eɪ/,/m/ , /a/,/w/, /d/, /r/,/s/, and /h/. 

The words that were most difficult for the child is ‘pancakes’. He says /pankek/ instead of /pankeik/. He omits the sound /i/ of the last syllable. 

The initial sound /m/, in the word mouth was problematic too, he took long to pronounce it and it was not very clear. 

Most of the words and syllables that he uttered were well articulated except the words ‘mouth’ and ‘hand’. 

Mickey focused on the book at the beginning of the interaction but lost his concentration towards the end. 

He demonstrated awareness that certain letters are pronounced in a particular way. Letter c, in the word ‘pancake’ he pronounced as /k/. 

He also knew that the letters k and h in the words ‘know’ and ‘yeah’ respectively, are silent. Matters (2000), posit that word and sound knowledge acquisition for preschool age is gradual and is dictated by the home interactions. 

Semantic knowledge 

When asked about what he thought the story was about, Mickey said it would be about pancakes, instead of food, meaning he understood the context. 

He used real life objects to reflect the books content when he said that if one messed with the chairs, the chairs were taken away. 

Using the cafeteria scenario, he said that people do not make noise while they are eating. Mickey triggers memory for the book content when he takes time to remember where people put their food when they are eating. 

Syntactic Knowledge 

The utterances that Mickey makes are single words and simple sentences. The three word sentences that he utters is ‘they take away’ and ‘I don’t know’ which are the longest. His utterances are simple but syntactically correct. 

His utterances mirrors the structure of the story text because it is as simple as the narration itself. 

He used questions when he get what the observer was asking at the beginning of the interaction. He responded by ‘mh?’ meaning he wanted clarification. He does not use language carriers in his speech. 

Morphemic Knowledge 

According to Silverman and Hartranft (2014), children may not be able to comprehend instances where they are supposed to include tense or number markers, in their speech but constant run-through equips them with the necessary skills. Mickey exhibited knowledge of inflectional morphemes. 

By saying “our hands”, he used the inflectional morpheme /-s/ that marks number, and adds into the singular word ‘hand’. There are no evidence derivational morpheme usage throughout the interaction. 

He indicated little knowledge of verb tense agreement. He said, “we can broke the chair”, instead of “we can break the chair”. 

Pragmatic Knowledge 

Mickey held the book upright and turned the pages appropriately after reading of every page. He followed the reading of the book correctly, from top to bottom. 

However, he did not show awareness of the book details such as the title, author, page numbers, beginning, and the end. He did not know of formal openings and endings of the story. 

Conclusion  

Mickey displayed familiarity with sounds and proper use of words. Only a few sounds were problematic to him. He could construct meaningful simple sentences, as well as ask questions where he did not get right. 

He showed little understanding of morphemes usage, throughout this interaction. He knew how to hold the book and follow the correct order of top to bottom reading. 

References  

Matters L (2000). Stories for Oral Language Development: Activities for Building Expressive Language Skills . Academic Communications Association. 

Silverman,D.R. & Hartranft,M.A. (2014)Developing Vocabulary and Oral Language in Young Children.1st Edition. The Gulford Press