FHS 1500-004

Alexis Bettfreund
Observation 1

Background Information
Child's Age: 2 years old
Name: Jordan
Location: Play group at a woman's house in my neighborhood
Description: 8 children and 3 adults

Physical Development

When I met Jordan I noticed he was extremely skinny and small compared to the other
children of his age. I assume he was well underweight than the average 2 year old. The textbook
says the average weight for a child of two years old should weigh at least 28 pounds to be
healthy (Berger, 2014, p. 92). Judging by his body size I would assume Jordan is well under the
healthy body weight.
Aside from his struggling body weight I was very impressed with Jordan's advanced
potty training as he asked one of his caregivers to take him to use the bathroom. According to
Erikson's stages of Development he is right on track for potty training (Berger, 2014, p. 24).
Maybe even a little more advanced as I noticed some of the other children still had diapers on.

Jordans motor skills seemed very average and normal as he was running all over the
place. According to the book 90% of children master the skill of running by 20 months (Berger,
2014, p. 104) and Jordan was well there.

Intellection/Cognitive Development
As far as Jordan's cognitive development he is very average according to Piaget's chart in
the text (Berger, 2014, p. 29). Jordan was using language to understand his world, naming toys
he was playing with, calling children by name, and somewhat putting words together to form
questions/sentences. Not in full sentences obviously, but it was understandable. His
pronunciation seemed to lack a little bit compared to the other children in the group but is well
aware of his language.
I also noticed his problem solving skills as he was putting together a set of train tracks, he
seemed to really understand the relationship between the objects (Berger, 2014 as well as
counting things like the number of blocks he had. Jordan seemed very advanced in his problem
solving skills compared to the other children.

Social/Emotional Development
Jordan showed good social skills as he interacted with other children as they laughed, ran,
and talked amongst each other which is well normal for his age according to Eriksons
psychosocial stages (Berger, 2014, p. 24). I had arrived as Jordans mother was dropping him off
which is one of the reasons why I chose to observe him. He seemed a little distressed when she
dropped him off but quickly forgot that she had even left. As we discussed in class that is very

healthy for the child to react less when his separation anxiety to his mother is healthy, this i was
very impressed with ( Berger, 2014, p. 133)
Reference List
Berger, K.S. (2014). Invitation to the lifespan (2nd ed.) New York, NY: Worth Publishers

I feel I did best on this assignment because it was really fun to go and observe and tie all things
you observed to topic learned in FHS. Observations actually were my favorite assignment and
came easier to me.