Influences of social interaction and play
As teachers are well aware, all learning for young children is interdependent: Cognitive development in the preschool years has important implications for children's social and language development, and social and language developments play an essential role in stimulating cognitive growth. Children construct their understanding of a concept in the course of interaction with others.
In developing ideas about what" school means, for example, children use what they hear people say about school, glimpses of buildings identified by others as schools, and stories about school that they have had read to them. Their initial ideas may be challenged, confirmed, elaborated on, or altered by subsequent interactions with peers, older children, or adults. And as Vygotsky demonstrated, much of children's understanding first occurs in
Communication with other people then appears in private speech (thinking aloud, and eventually is internalized as thought As children's memory, language, and other aspects of cognition improve and change their relationships with others are affected.