Observation

             I chose to do my observation on my one year old son Teilo. Obviously I see him every day so it was hard for me to pick one area or one specific area to observe. This paper is actually done over a few days and chronicles different aspects of Teilo's development. .
             I observed Teilo mainly at home, however one of the observations was done while he was in a playgroup at Gymboree. I did the 5.2 observational activity while at home since that is the most detailed and succinct of the choices. Also he is very familiar with the home atmosphere and there are not a lot of distractions for him there. I was able to check off many of the activities on the checklist. The only thing that I could not observe him doing at home was walking up and down stairs. I have observed him performing this ability at his grandpa's house and other relatives that have stairs. Of course it is a slow task. He will take a minute to contemplate the stairs, then he stands up with his hand against the wall, then he gets down on his knees again, and then he will either crawl up or back down, stopping every step or two to look at me or his grandpa. He doesn't really walk down the stairs though, he will crawl down them backwards. (This amazes me since he was only shown once or twice how to crawl off of the couch backwards and not the stairs. But the fact that he was able to make the correlation between the height of a couch and the height of a stair truly astounds me.) In the book they state, the definition of correlation, according to scientific research, is said to exist between two variables if one of them is likely - or less likely - to occur when the other variable occurs. (chapter 1 p. 21). Perhaps for Teilo to use his knowledge of backing off the couch and transposing that to the stairs must mean that he understands that as the couch is tall so are the stairs and the easiest way to get down from something high is to back down from the object.