Preoperational Child Development

From birth, it is important for practitioners to support the early years’ mathematical development. Children learn emergent maths which is a “term used to describe children construct mathematics from birth” (Geist, 2010). The Early Years Statuary Frameworks (EYFS) (Department of Education) states that maths is one of the specific areas.

The third stage is the Concrete Operational Stage, which occurs around age seven to age eleven. This stage marks the beginning of logical or operational thoughts for the child. Their thinking becomes less egocentric, and the child can now understand that although the appearance of something changes, the “thing” itself does not. For example, if a child decided to spread out a pile of blocks, they know there are still as many blocks as there were before, even though it looks different.

From the age of seven to about eleven, children become capable of performing mental operations or working through problems and ideas in their minds. However, they can perform operations only on tangible objects and real events. Children also achieve conservation, reversibility, and decentration during this stage:

During the ages of two to seven, the child would be in the preoperational stage. This involves the child having an egocentric

The sensorimotor stage infants develop their schemas through sensory and motor activities. Followed by the preoperational stage where children begin to think symbolically using words, to represent concepts. Next concrete operational stage children display many important thinking skills, like ability to think logically. Finally, formal operational stage young adolescences formulate their operations by abstract and hypothetical thinking. Piaget’s theory provides ample and insightful perspectives, so it remains the central factor of contemporary

At the age of 4-7 the child reaches the, ?Intuitive?, stage, at this stage the child has some concept of differences i.e. the child can distinguish between the size and colour of different coloured bricks. However the child is still what Piaget called, ?Egocentric?, unable to see things from another?s point of view.

Children can classify and order, as well as organise objects into series. The child is still tied to the immediate experience but within these limitations can perform logical mental operations. For example, can solve mental problems using counters and objects.

Pre-operational stage (toddler and early childhood) is demonstrated through the use of symbols, language, matures, memory and imagination are developed but thinking is non-logical.

The preoperational stage is when infants become older, young children and they are able to think in a more symbolic way. In this stage children start to learn the difference between real and make believe, past and future. They tend to have more of an imagination as they grow older. Children in the preoperational stage still are not completely logical with their thinking. They go more off intuition. Do more of what they want to do, not what is the best thing to do. They are still too young to grasp the concept of cause and effect. They also do not understand time and comparison yet.

Children develop cognition through two main stages that Jean Piaget theorized. The stages run from birth and infancy to school age children. Sensorimotor is the first stage and goes from birth to about the age of two. This stage implies that the children learn about the environment they live in and they learn this through the reflexes and movements they produce. They also learn that they are separate people from their parents and they can say goodbye to them and know they will come back. The second stage is called the preoperational stage. During this stage of development, children will learn how to incorporate symbols to represent objects. This is also the beginning of learning the alphabet and speech. The child is still very much egocentric at this point in time, but with the help of understanding educators, the child will grow appropriately onto the next stages of development. Finally, the children need to develop emotionally/socially.

The Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development is also known as the stage theory. It introduces that, in the expansion of our thinking, we act through an organized and certain sequence of steps. However, the theory focuses not only on compassionate how the children obtain knowledge, but likewise on the discernment of the substance of intelligence. According to the Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, there are two stages in the thinking pattern of a 3-year old preschooler and 9-year-old student. They are the preoperational stage for the 2 to 7 year old and the concrete operations stage for the 9 year old. The preoperational stage (three years old preschooler), this is where a new child can intellectually perform and signify to the objects and issues with the quarrel or the images, and they can act. The concrete operations (nine year old student), where a child is at the stage and deliver the ability to maintain, reserve their thinking, and analyze the objects in conditions of their many parts. However, they can also assume logically and understand comparison, but only about the concrete events.

The vocabulary of a child is also expanded during this stage. The main features he identified in this stage were symbolisation, egocentrism, animism and moral realism. All pre-operational children are usually egocentric in the way they think, meaning that they are only able to consider things from their own viewpoint, and thinks everyone shares this view, because it is the only one possible. During this stage, a certain amount of ‘decentring’ occurs.

The fourth stage of Piaget’s Cognitive Stages of Development is the Formal operational stage. This stage is normally reached at age 11. These children are usually able to logically use symbols related to abstract concepts, such as algebra and science. These children can think about multiple variables in systemic ways, form hypotheses, and consider possibilities. Although Piaget believed in lifelong intellectual development, he insisted that the formal operational stage is the final stage of cognitive development, and that continued intellectual development in adults depends on the accumulation of knowledge (Shroff, 2015).

In the concrete operational stage between the ages of seven and twelve, children become capable of logical thought, they also start to be able to think abstractly. However they are best suited to visible or concrete objects and things they can see (Lee and Gupta). Once the child has reached the formal operations stage from twelve years onwards it becomes more practiced at abstract processing, carrying out problem solving systematically and methodically thus completing the cognitive development process.

Children in this stage do not yet understand concrete logic and cannot mentally manipulate information.