1 - Early Childhood - Physical & Cognitive

3-6

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

• During the ages _______, children will be growing rapidly, normally losing their babyish roundness and take an athletic appearance of childhood.

Sleep walking

walking around and sometimes performing other functions while asleep.

Sleep talking

talking while asleep

Night Terror

abrupt awakening from a deep sleep in state of agitation, generally occurs in young children.

Nightmares

a bad dream, sometimes brought on by staying up too late, eating a heavy meal close to bedtime, or excitement.

Enuresis

repeated urination in clothing or bed

• 3-6

From _______, the most rapid brain growth occurs in the frontal areas that regulate planning and goal setting.

• 6

• 90℅

By age ___ , the brain has attained about ____ of its peak

6-11

From ______, rapid brain growth occurs in the areas that support associative thinking, language, and special relations

• Gross motor

• Fine motor

• Systems of action

Children ages 3 to 6 make great advances in motor skill developments. (3)

3 year olds

WHAT AGE? Gross Motor Skills in Early Childhood

• Cannot turn or stop suddenly or quickly

• Can jump a distance of 15 to 24 inches

• Can ascend a stairway unaided, alternating feet

• Can hop, using an irregular series of jumps

4 year olds

• more effective control of stopping, starting, and turning

• jump 24 to 33 inches

• descend a long stairway alternating feet, if supported

• hop four to six steps on one foot

5 year olds

• Can start, turn, and stop effectively in games

• make a running jump of 28 to 36 inches

• Can descend a long stairway unaided, alternating feet

• easily hop a distance of 16 feet

Preoperational Approach

What Piagetian Approach is in Early Childhood?

• children this age are not yet ready to engage in logical mental operations.

• use of symbols

• identities

• cause & effect

• ability to classify

• understanding of number

• empathy

• Theory of Mind

COGNITIVE ADVANCES DURING EARLY CHILDHOOD

Use of Symbols

• Children do not need to be in sensorimotor contact with an object, person, or event in order to think about it.

• They can imagine that objects or people have properties other than those they actually have.

Symbolic Function

Piaget’s term for ability to use mental representations (words, numbers, or images) to which a child has attached meaning.

Understanding of Identities

Children are aware that superficial alterations do not change the nature of things.

• people are basically the same even if they change in outward form, size, or appearance

Understanding Cause & Effect / Causality

Children realize that events have causes.

Ablity to Classify / Categorization

Children organize objects, people, and events into meaningful categories.

Understanding Numbers

Children can count and deal with quantities.

Empathy

Children become more able to imagine how others might feel.

Theory of Mind

Children become more aware of mental activity and the functioning of the mind

• allows us to understand and predict others’ behavior and makes the social world understandable.

• Centration

• Irreversability

• Focus on States rather than Transformation

• Transductive Reasoning

• Egocentrism

• Animism

• Inability to distinguish Appearance from Reality

IMMATURE ASPECTS OF PREOPERATIONAL THOUGHT

Centration

• Inability to decenter

• Children focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others.

Irreversability

Children fail to understand that some operations or actions can be reversed, restoring the original situation.

Focus on States rather than Transformation

Children fail to understand the significance of the transformation between states. (fail to understand why changes happen between situations)

Transductive reasoning

Children do not use deductive or inductive reasoning; instead, they see cause where none exists.

• if a child sees a black cat and then a dog barking nearby, they might assume the cat caused the dog to bark because they happened to see them together, even though there's no direct causal relationship.They link things together based on what they see or experience, rather than understanding broader patterns or principles.

Egocentrism

Children assume everyone else thinks, perceives, and feels as they do.

• a child might believe that if they like a certain toy, everyone else must like it too, or if they feel a certain way about something, everyone else must feel the same

Animism

Children attribute life to objects not alive.

Inability to distinguish Appearance from Reality

Children confuse what is real with outward appearance

• if they see a realistic-looking toy snake, they might believe it's a real snake until they touch it or someone tells them otherwise.

• encoding

• storage

• retrieval

Information-processing theorists focus on the processes that affect cognition.

• According to this view, memory can be described as filing system that has three steps, or processes:

Encoding

process by which information is prepared for long-term storage and later retrieval

Storage

retention of information in memory for future use

Retrieval

process by which information is accessed or recalled from memory storage

• Sensory Memory

• Working Memory

• Long-term Memory

TYPES OF STORAGE

Sensory memory

initial, brief, temporary storage of sensory information.

Working memory

short-term storage of information being actively processed

Long-term memory

storage of virtually unlimited capacity that holds information for long periods

• Recognition

• Recall

TYPES OF RETRIEVAL

Recognition

Ability to identify a previously encountered stimulus.

Recall

Ability to reproduce material from memory.

EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING

Conscious control of thoughts, emotions, and actions to accomplish goals or solve problems.

growth of working memory

The ______________ permits the development of executive function.

Generic memory

CHILDHOOD Memories:

Produces a script, or general outline of familiar, repeated event.

• such as riding the bus to preschool or having lunch at Grandma’s house

• remembering that you have a dentist appointment tomorrow without recalling specific details

Episodic memory

refers to awareness of having experienced a particular event at a specific time and place.

• getting vaccinated at the pediatrician’s office might originally be an episodic memory—a child might remember the particular event

Autobiographical memory

a type of episodic memory, refers to memories of distinctive experiences that form a person’s life history

STANFORD-BINET INTELLIGENCE SCALES

Individual intelligence tests for ages 2 and up used to measure

• fluid reasoning

• knowledge

• quantitative reasoning

• visual-spatial, and working memory

WECHSLER PRESCHOOL AND PRIMARY SCALE OF INTELLIGENCE, REVISED (WPPSI-III)

This includes subtests designed to measure

• verbal and nonverbal fluid reasoning

• combined score

interaction / interactive

According to Vygotsky, children learn through _______ with others. This ________ learning is most effective in helping children cross the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

the imaginary psychological space between what children can do and what they could do with help

dynamic tests

The ZPD can be assessed by _______ _____ that , according to Vygotskyan theory, provide a better measure of children’s intellectual potential than do traditional psychometric tests.

Scaffolding

Temporary support to help a child master a task

Fast Mapping

process by which a child absorbs the meaning of a new word after hearing it once or twice in conversation

Pragmatics

the practical knowledge needed to use language for communicative purposes. The social context of language.

Private speech

talking aloud to oneself with no intent to communicate with others.