Hi a warm welcome to the site and apologies for the delay replying.
These are difficult times but if you've been able to conduct a few different types of observation on children in your workplace you'll be able to use those for this criteria.
What the criteria hopes you'll come to see is that there are diffent types of observations that helps us to capture information that can be used for different purposes. These methods need to be objective as they can be influenced by different of factors -
page 377 looks at this and then
page 267 looks at the range of observations that you might be familiar with in your workplace.
For example:
Checklists might be used to record whether children can use a particular skill eg. catching a ball, or whether they have completes a specific activity. The focus will not be on how they do it but whether or not they are able to.
Simple note taking is a type of obsevation that is usually very short and may be written on a post-it note or sticker, so that early years practitioners remember an idea or comment that a child has made.
Free description observations collect details that are about a child who is carrying out an activity and the observer wishes to write everything down. This includes how practitioners interact with one another, both verbally and non-vernbally, and includes a lot of detal. Free description observations are usually written in the present tense - they are, child is, plays with, talks to, child eats - examples of present tense language
Event sampling is a method used to note down how often a child/pupil shows a particular type of behaviour or goes to an activity over a period of time. Event samples should be carried out simply by watching the child and noting down the frequency of the focussed behaviour. For an event sample, the observer should not be participating in the activity, only observing what is happening.
Informal observation is a kind of observation that may be used if you have been asked to keep an eye on a child for a specvific reason, in particular if adults have concerns about them. The format is not important, although you will need to be careful about confidentiality if you use notebooks.
There are also some explanations for the different types of observation and links on this thread
http://www.silkysteps.com/forum/showthread.php?t=14832 .
To analyse your observational methods you need to identify what type they are and the reason why they are being used. Once you have those two pieces of information you can look to see how the observation achieves it's aim/reason eg. if an event sample is beiing used because there are concerns about how a child is settling into the nursery, is an event sample being used to collect information specifically about ie, obserbvation is done when the child arrives, notes who they arrive with and what happens.
I hope this helps, all the best with your study and please feel free to post whenever you need to. Replies might be a little late but members always try to help out where they can xx