Preschool children ages 3 - 5:
Cognitive development refers to the acquisition and use of thinking skills. It a child’s
increasing ability to think and reason, they are active participants in the learning process,
they are learning how to learn. Like scientists preschool children are curious about what
they observe, they ask questions, make predictions about what will happen and test their
ideas, they recall past experiences and apply what they know to new situations in order to
understand them. They are interested in cause and effect, sometimes they make
connections between what they have observed and what they have experienced even
though the ideas put together are not related. “ …show more content…
For example, a child will sometimes cover their eyes so that they cannot see
someone and make the assumption that the other person now cannot see them either.
They believe your thoughts are just like theirs. Cognitive skills also include
mathematical thinking. For example, preschool children can sort objects and explain how
they classified them : “these are all red and the other pile is blue” Mathematics is a way
of thinking about and organizing information. It involves finding order, quantifying,
comparing objects recognizing patterns, seeing relationships, making predictions and
solving problems. It uses special language: more, less, equal the same and so on. One
might hear preschoolers often say things such as, “he has more cars than I do”, I can run faster than you”, “we have the same”. Children make sense of information by focusing
on one feature of an object at a time, they do not necessarily judge things by what is
logical to an adult. A major indicator of this stage is called conservation, or the ability to
understand that quantity does not change just because shape changes. For example, if you
were to pour the same quantity of liquid into two separate glasses, one short and wide