Observational Study

For my observational study, I chose to observe a child named Andrew. Andrew has been a student at Busy Bees Childcare Center for approximately 3 years, and I have been an employee there for an equal amount of time. In order to ensure this observation was not intrusive, I conducted the observation on personal time, and a teacher’s aide was placed in the room during the time of observation. Andrew is 4 years old, and has been diagnosed with a high-spectrum form of autism. At the time of observation, there were 14 children between the ages of 3 and 9 in the room including Andrew, one of them being his non-autistic twin brother, and two teachers excluding myself. The observation itself was done in the pre-school classroom of the daycare center. I began my observation at 7:30AM when Andrew arrived at the center. He wouldn’t let his mother put him down for about 10 minutes. Andrew also wouldn’t sit down for breakfast. Instead, the teacher periodically took bite sized pieces of food to him and tried to coo him into eating small bits at a time while he played with the kitchen set. He finished less than half of his breakfast by around 8:15 and wouldn’t eat anything else after that. Andrew didn’t say much during the morning, and for the most part kept to himself throughout the morning. After breakfast, Andrew spent a great deal of time looking for a small plastic yellow pot that belongs with the kitchen set. When he realized another child had the pot Andrew began to scream and then threw himself on the ground. One of the teachers then stepped in and gave Andrew the yellow pot and he immediately ceased his crying. Andrew then went to the bin of wooden blocks and picked out numbers one through five, placing them face up in the pot. Andrew carried around this yellow pot for a large portion of the time of observation, occasionally looking down to make sure they were still face up and in numerical order. When he did put down the blocks, he took the blocks