Explain The Developmental Stages Of Pre-K Children

Development stages of Pre-Kindergarten Children

The developmental stages for Pre-k students varies greatly due to the immense growth a child goes through during this time. Physical abilities of fine and gross motor skills are learned and built upon day in and day out. Their cognitive skills go from doing to thinking about what they are going to do. And one of the biggest changes are the social and emotion changes they go through. They learn to be less dependent on their parents and more dependent on teachers and peers. Every child is different and may develop slower or faster than others. Theorist such as Jean Piaget referred to this as the preoperational stage in which children learn through experimentation with objects and their communication/understanding

In this stage of development children start to think about things symbolically. Their communication skills start to mature by interacting with others and start to engage in make-believe play by using preexisting memory like playing house or cooking dinner. A few characteristics a child may exhibit are egocentrism and conservation (Washington 137-139). Children think that others see the world as they do and lack the ability to realize that the environment is not centered around them. For example, child “A” might be mad about a parent leaving them at school. They see child “B” angry too and tell teacher that he/she is angry because their parents left them at school, when on fact child “B” is mad that someone step on their foot. They also have difficulty with the ability to understanding quantities that remain the same even if it’s transferred to another container that is a different shape or size. For example, if you take a 12-ounce bottled water and pure it in a 16-ounce cup, they think there’s less water in the

A child has the ability to learn as long as what is being presented is within their “zone of proximal development” (Slaven 39). He noticed that children couldn’t grasp and retain the information being taught if it was too far above their current understanding. This causes issues for a teacher in the 3-year-old pre-kindergarten classroom, because he/she as no reference point to start with. Teachers know to encourage learning, they have to teach just above the current abilities, but need to take caution not to overshoot the abilities so to speak. It must be repeated that every child has different levels of cognitive abilities and care must be taken on the teacher’s part to ensure that what is taught is retained by the child to build upon in the