cognitive development
Some important cognitive changes occur during preschool, particularly in terms of mental representation. Whereas infants and toddlers have limited ability to form representation of their a world (images, concepts) and hold them in memory, children in preschool possess more of that extraordinary ability. When asked about past or future events, preschoolers (unlike toddlers) are able to think about what happened weeks ago or anticipate what has not yet happened. They can create fanciful scenes (e g., in which one child a pilot and the other runs the control tower), coordinating roles and story lines, and by 4 and 5 years old, they do so with an awareness that they are acting out an imaginary idea. They become more efficient thinkers as they start to organize their thoughts into categories, and they show more sophisticated use of symbols through their use of pretend objects in play and drawings for learning and communicating.
In spite of their many advances, preschoolers can be illogical, egocentric, and one-dimensional in their thinking, Piaget referred to these years as a preoperational stage of development, emphasizing that children ages 2 to are less capable in their thinking compared with older children. More recent research indicates that preschoolers have greater cognitive abilities than has been sometimes assumed, at least when children are in familiar situations and tasks are clearly explained to them no know or Preschool children can appear understand more or less-than they actually do.
At times they seem mature and relatively advanced in their thinking, and then later seem limited and inflexible. As preschoolers move from and between simpler to more complex thinking skills, it is helpful to remember that they are not merely functioning less effectively older children or adults, their narrow focus than on a limited amount of information at any given time is actually useful while they are leaning so many things so rapidly That is, because they are just on the cusp of grasping a variety of concepts, words, and skills at a new level, they learn best when they can attend to just one thing at a time (e g., putting all the yellow crayons and chalk in one another- cementing awareness of color ) rather than attending to multiple things(e.g., yellow versus purple, crayons versus chalk, and broken versus whole, which is too many concepts to achieve success)
Below are brief descriptions of some influences on cognitive development, as well as characteristics of children's thought, that a preschool teacher might expect to see.