Piagets Theory

Piaget’s Theory of cognitive development in early childhood is defined as the way a child’s mental activities and capabilities evolve through childhood to adolescents. They gain a sense of mental activities when they begin to think logically about the experiments they conduct to adapt to their environment. This theory has four stages, and they are; sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. The sensorimotor stage(birth- 2) is defined at the time when a child is not capable of making schemas for things that are not in front of them. Children adapt to the world around them by using their five senses and basic motor skills. There are four developmental tasks in this stage, and they are; Symbolic thought, out of sight-out of mind, goal directed behavior and object permanence. Symbolic thought is defined at the way a child labels what they see in everyday life, also known as forming schemas. A child that is still developing cannot think about the imagined or envisioned entity. For example, I played a very well-known game of “peek-a-boo”, with my one year old daughter. I would cover my face with my hands and wait five seconds later and then remove my hands quickly and say peek-a-boo. She would start laughing and smiling. When I covered my face she would whine a little.
In the encyclopedia Britannica, this stage is marked by the child’s acquisition of various sensorimotor schemes, which may be defined as mental representations of motor actions that are used to obtain a goal; such actions include sucking, grasping, banging, kicking, and throwing, etc. The preoperational stage (2-7) is defined as the time when children can represent objects mentally and form schemas before knowing what they are. They are now able to tie their experiments together and test waters. The developmental tasks are preoperational egocentrism, irreversibility and lack of conservation. Preoperational egocentrism is defined as a child’s inability to see the