Page 5 - LESSION 9.pmd

Stages of Child Development Three to Six years and Six to Eight Years

Symbolic Function: Preschoolers make and register an image of an item in their
mind and even in the absence of any sensory cues from their environment, and
Notes they can still remember about them. They have an ability to name these objects
using symbols such as words and numbers.

Spatial Thinking: Children in this age group become better at understanding
spatial relationships. They can understand that a picture represents something
that is not present but may exist. However, they may not be able to correctly
understand the relationship between the picture and the actual object.

Causality: Children at this stage are able to think about causes of familiar
events. They can comprehend that all living things grow in size when they
receive nutrition. They reach such reasoning by their observation of the natural
environment coupled with what they hear from their parents and others about
such events. However, they cannot yet reason logically about the cause and
effect. They may link two events that occur close together in time or space to
be related as cause and effect. For example, just because the preschooler had
a bad thought just before the sibling fell sick, a preschooler may relate the
negative thoughts with sibling falling ill.
Categorisation and Identities: Categorisation refers to the children’s ability
to identify similarities and differences in objects. Children at this stage have not
yet fully mastered this but they may classify objects as good, bad, friend, non-
friend, edible, inedible, utensil, furniture and so forth.

In addition to that, they may attribute life-like characteristics to non-living
objects and assume them to be living. This cognitive limitation was termed
animism by Piaget.

You have studied in the lesson, 'Domains of Development' that preschool children
develop a better understanding of identities i.e. they understand that objects
remain the same even if they change their physical appearance or form and size.
This helps them to see the order and predictability in the world around them.
But preschoolers’ understanding of identities is not fully developed. They lack
the ability to conserve. They may believe that out of two rows of coins, a longer
looking row of coins has more coins (conservation of number); when a stick
is placed ahead of the other, even when the two stick are of same length,
preschool children may believe that one is longer than the other. They also focus
their thought on only one aspect of a situation and are not able to take into
account three to four aspects of a situation simultaneously.

Egocentrism: You have already studied that according to Piaget, preschool
children centre on their own viewpoint and cannot understand another person’s
perspective. To study this, Piaget designed a Three Mountain task, where a doll

124 EARLY CHILDHOOD CARE AND EDUCATION