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• Bodily growth and change ages 3-6


  • Children lose babyish roundness and take an athletic appearance of childhood
• Sleep disturbances

  • Sleep walking
  • Night terror
  • Sleep talking
  • Nightmare
  • Enuresis
• Sleep walking


  Walking around and sometimes performing other functions while asleep
• Night terror


  Abrupt awakening from a deep sleep in a state of agitation, generally occurs in young children
• Sleep talking


  Talking while asleep
• Nightmare


  A bad dream, sometimes brought on by staying up too late, eating a heavy meal close to bedtime, or over excitement
• Enuresis


  Repeated urination in clothing or in bed, most common in males
• Brain growth ages 3-6


  • Most rapid growth occurs in the frontal areas that regulate planning and goal setting
• Brain growth by age 6


  • Attains about 90 percent of its peak
• Brain growth ages 6-11


  • Rapid growth occurs in areas that support associative thinking, language, and spatial relations
• Motor skill development ages 3-6


  • Children make great advances
• Gross motor skills


  Physical skills that involve the large muscles
• Fine motor skills


  Physical skills that involve the small muscles and eye–hand coordination
• System of action


  Increasingly complex combinations of motor skills, which permit a wider or more precise range of movement and more control of the environment
• Preoperational stage


  Children this age are not yet ready to engage in logical mental operations
• Use of symbols


  • Children do not need to be in sensorimotor contact with an object, person, or event in order to think about it
  • Children can imagine that objects or people have properties other than those they actually have
• Understanding of identities


  • Children are aware that superficial alterations do not change the nature of things
• Understanding of cause and effect


  • Children realize that events have causes
• Ability to classify


  • Children organize objects, people, and events into meaningful categories
• Understanding of number


  • Children can count and deal with quantities
• Empathy


  • Children become more able to imagine how others might feel
• Theory of mind


  • Children become more aware of mental activity and the functioning of the mind
• Centration


  • Inability to decenter, children focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others
• Irreversibility


  • Children fail to understand that some operations or actions can be reversed, restoring the original situation
• Focus on states rather than transformations


  • Children fail to understand the significance of the transformation between states
• Transductive reasoning


  • Children do not use deductive or inductive reasoning; instead, they see cause where none exists
• Egocentrism


  • Children assume everyone else thinks, perceives, and feels as they do
• Animism


  • Children attribute life to objects not alive
• Inability to distinguish appearance from reality


  • Children confuse what is real with outward appearance
• Encoding


  Process by which information is prepared for long-term storage and later retrieval
• Storage


  Retention of information in memory for future use
• Retrieval


  Process by which information is accessed or recalled from memory storage
• Types of memory storage

  • Sensory memory
  • Working memory
  • Long-term memory
• Sensory memory


  Initial, brief, temporary storage of sensory information
• Working memory


  Short-term storage of information being actively processed
• Long-term memory


  Storage of virtually unlimited capacity that holds information for long periods
• Types of retrieval

  • Recognition
  • Recall
• Recognition


  Ability to identify a previously encountered stimulus
• Recall


  Ability to reproduce material from memory
• Executive functioning


  The conscious control of thoughts, emotions, and actions to accomplish goals or to solve problems