Cognitive Skills

Ages 8 to 10 years are a great time for cognitive development (see full Glossary). Although children at this age are still concrete thinkers, they are starting to toy with and understand abstract thinking (see full Glossary). They are able to multi-task cognitively and see the same concept, event, or item from many different perspectives.

Most children can:

• pay continuous attention for about 20 minutes or so;
• solve simple problems, independently;
• solve complex problems with a little bit of help from an adult;
• be very curious about situations and events around them;
• know the difference between a fact and an opinion ;
• know what is real and what is not (for example, Superman is not real, the postman is real);
• have a tendency to exaggerate certain events;
• observe and relate events with a large degree of precision (for example, will give lots of details about the class trip to the zoo);
• classify objects based on three and four common characteristics (for example, will classify objects based on color, shape and size);
• plan and carry out an “investigation” (for example, let’s try to see where all the cookies went);
• identify different parts of a story (for example, this happened at the beginning, this does not happen until the end);
• understand that things fit into small and large categories. This is called “class inclusion”.
• use background knowledge to learn new things;
• know which province (Fig. 1) they live in;
• know the capital of their province.

Figure 1. Map of British Columbia and Alberta

Did you know?

Children at this age may overestimate what they are able to do. Please remember this when your child promises to do something and then does not do it.

see References