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• Physical Development in Early Childhood (Ages 3-6)

  Children slim down and shoot up, need less sleep, more likely to develop sleep problems, improve in running, hopping, and jumping, become better at tying shoelaces
• Bodily Growth and Change


  • Children usually start to lose their baby-like roundness and gain slimness, abdominal muscles develop, slight dominance in height and weight for boys, adolescent growth spurt
• Motor Skills


  • Children perform differently depending on their genetic makeup and ability to learn and practice, gross motor skills develop, fine motor skills require eyes, hands and coordination of small muscles, systems of action are increasingly complex combinations of skills, handedness is usually evident by age 3
• Food Security


  Occurs when families do not have dependable access to adequate amounts of food
• Undernutrition


  An underlying cause in about a third of worldwide deaths for children under 5
• Children across a variety of different cultures with a variety of allergies, including indoor and outdoor allergies, skin allergies, and food allergies, are more likely to come from families of higher socioeconomic status
• Common causes of death in early childhood

  • Cancer
  • Congenital abnormalities and chromosomal disorders
  • Assault and homicide
  • Heart disease
  • Respiratory diseases
  • Septicemia
• Health in Context: Environmental Influence

  • Poor children are more likely than other children to have chronic conditions and activity limitations, to lack health insurance, and to have unmet medical and dental needs, homelessness results from circumstances that force people to choose between food, shelter, and other basic needs, environmental factors such as exposure to poverty, homelessness, smoking, air pollution, and pesticides increase the risks of illness or injury, lead poisoning can have serious physical, cognitive, and behavioral effects
• 4 Stages of Cognitive Development by Jean Piaget

  • Sensorimotor Intelligence (from birth to 2yrs.old)
  • Preoperational Thinking (2 -7yrs.old)
  • Concrete Operational Thinking (7-11yrs. Old)
  • Formal Operational Thinking (12 yrs.old &up)
• Piagetian Approach: The Preoperational Child


  • Characterized by the use of symbolic thought, not yet fully ready to engage in logical mental operations, increase their use of language and other symbols
• Symbolic Function


  Children are able to think about things symbolically, such as playing in a box like they are in a car, or holding a banana as a phone
• Cognitive Advances during Early Childhood


  • Understanding of objects in space, understanding of causality (tendency to mentally link particular phenomena, whether or not there is logically a causal relationship), understanding of identities and categorization (including animism), understanding of number
• Immature Aspects of Preoperational Thought (According to Piaget)

  Centration (tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others), Decentration (thinking simultaneously about several aspects of a situation), Egocentrism (inability to consider another person's point of view), Conservation (awareness that two objects that are equal according to a certain measure remain equal in the face of perpetual alteration), Irreversibility (failure to understand that an operation can go in two or more directions), Theory of Mind (the awareness and understanding of mental processes)
• False Beliefs and Deception

  • The understanding that people can hold false beliefs flows from the realization that people can hold incorrect mental representations of reality
• Distinguishing between Appearance and Reality


  About 5-6 do children begin to understand the distinction between what seems to be and what is
• Distinguishing between Fantasy and Reality


  Sometimes between 18 months and three years children learn to distinguish between real and imagined events
• Information - Processing Approach: Memory

  • Children improve in attention and in the speed and efficiency which they process information and they begin to form long-lasting memories, including encoding, storage, and retrieval, sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory, central executive, executive function, recognition and recall, forming and retaining of childhood memories, generic memory, episodic memory, autobiographical memory
• Influences on Memory Retention

  When events are rare or unusual, children seem to remember them better, social interaction model proposes children construct autobiographical memories through conversation with adults about shared events
• Language Development


  • Vocabulary increases greatly, grammar and syntax become fairly sophisticated, children become more competent in pragmatics (the practical knowledge needed to use language for communicative purposes), including social speech and private speech, causes of delayed language development are unclear but may have serious consequences if untreated
• Preparation for Literacy


  Preschoolers' development of skills, knowledge, and attitudes that underlie reading and writing (emergent literacy)
• Media and Cognition


  Unlike infants and toddlers, preschool-age children comprehend the symbolic nature of television and can readily imitate behaviors they see
• Early Childhood in Education


  • Going to preschool is an important step, widening a child's physical, cognitive, and social environment, the transition to kindergarten is another momentous step
• The Montessori Method


  Based on the belief that children's natural intelligence involves rational, spiritual, and empirical aspects
• The Reggio Emilia Approach

  A less formal model than Montessori, named for the town in Italy in which the movement started in the 1940s