Tag: cognitive development

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1.3 Cognitive Development: Development in Early Elementary

Early Elementary Years

Cognitive Development: Early Elementary Years1

The development of cognitive and thinking skills follows a predictable order. As children develop their cognitive skills during the early years, they get a set of tools that will allow them to cope with (and also function within) the later demands of their school years.

This discovery will continue throughout their preschool, middle and high-school years as they experiment with different activities and situations. Young children who are given room to play and to try out different toys and tools will be more likely develop the skills needed to learn to read, write, do math and try out different life-skills situations as they grow from children to adults.

Key Point: Recent studies report that children who have little or no opportunities to play may fail to develop their cognitive, language and social skills to their full potential. They may also lag behind their peers in these areas.
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1.3 Cognitive Development: Pre-academic

Pre-academic Skills

Cognitive Development: Pre-academic Skills1

Pre-academic skills are part of cognitive development. Young children who develop these skills have better chances of succeeding later on at school, and carry the skills with them as they grow older.

Pre-academic skills include:

  • being interested in books
  • enjoying being read to
  • understanding that letters and numbers are symbols that mean something
  • being able to retell basic parts of a story
  • recognizing certain logos (e.g. McDonald’s golden arches)
  • being able to engage in simple and complex phoneme awareness (see full Glossary) exercises
  • identifying letters of the alphabet
  • matching forms and letters
  • demonstrating an understanding of one to one correspondence (see full Glossary)
  • scribbling
  • imitating vertical and horizontal strokes (Fig. 1)
  • completing simple and complex sequences.
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1.3 Cognitive Development: Thinking Skills

Thinking or Evaluation Skills

Cognitive Development: Thinking or Evaluation Skills1

Cognitive skills allow a child to function well in school and society. These skills refer to a child’s ability to receive, process and organize information in a way that allows him or her to use the information properly, both in the present time and later on. They include simple and complex skills.

LESS COMPLEX SKILLS INCLUDE:

 

COMPLEX SKILLS INCLUDE:

  • paying attention to and concentrating on a task or activity
  • easily changing from one task to another
  • recognizing and understanding when a situation is unsafe
  • pointing out that something is silly
  • identifying missing parts of objects
  • engaging in divergent and creative thinking, or thinking “outside the box”
  • answering “why do we” questions
  • adjusting to changes in the environment and modifying (see full Glossary) one’s plans, accordingly
  • remembering directions and instructions
  • generalizing (see full Glossary) what one has learned from one situation to the next
  • being able to give simple directions
  • being able to describe a certain goal viewing a situation from more than one perspective
  • understanding that there are consequences to one’s actions.

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1.3 What is Development: Cognitive Development

Cognitive Development: A Brief Overview

Cognitive development1 involves the child’s ability to grow and develop their thinking or evaluation skills, and adapt to changes. It begins with the infant developing “object permanence object permanence  (see full Glossary) and realizing action and reaction, or “cause and effect”. During the preschool years, it may involve simple abilities, like recognizing colors, or complex abilities, like concentrating on a task. Other cognitive abilities include the following:

  • adapting to changes in one’s environment
  • engaging in activities that require thinking “outside the box” or divergent thinking (see full Glossary)
  • being creative
  • learning new skills and apply them to other (old or new) situations
  • pre-academic skills needed for the child to engage in directed or school-based learning activities. These require self-regulation; (see full Glossary) for example, sitting quietly for certain periods of time, listening to and following instructions, sorting and categorizing items (like shapes or colours) and completing paper and pencil tasks, like drawing or writing.

Developing cognitive skills takes time, and takes both experience and practice. Some more complex cognitive skills, like completing multiplication with decimals, are only possible if equally important “simpler” skills develop first, like counting and sequencing. The development of cognitive skills follows an order that is quite predictable for almost all children. Although most children follow the same order, each child acquires these skills at slightly different rates than other children. People working in the study of child development refer to these as individual differences (see full Glossary). They are related to every child’s unique physical and temperamental characteristics, and to the environment and culture where they grow and develop.

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