Ch 5: Early Childhood Flashcards
What age is considered early childhood?
Pre-school to kindergarten, ages 3 to 6
What are the physical skills associated with early childhood?
Children can cut, climb, jump, follow some directions, and describe their lives
What is the framework for teaching early childhood?
Exploration, provide a person-environment fit
How does language develop?
Expands dramatically, phonemic ability improves, mean length of utterance expands syntax improves, semantic understanding shoots up
How do preschoolers think?
Focus on the way objects and substances appear, center on what captures their eye, lack identity constancy, animism and artificialism , egocentric
Describe autism spectrum disorders
differences in theory of mind, difficulties having conversations, sharing feelings, connecting with adults and peers, social challenges and stereotyped behaviors
How do children learn they have an enduring self?
Having sensitive past talk conversations with care givers
How do children decode other people’s mental states?
Concrete operational thinking, when they can step back from visual perceptions and reason more conceptually
What does preschool play look like?
Exercise play, rough and tumble play, collaborative play gender segregated play
What makes humanity special?
Humans have a unique ability to reflect on our actions, read each other’s minds, and have social cognitive skills
What are Erikson’s early-childhood tasks?
Initiative versus guilt
What are Erikson’s middle-childhood tasks?
Initiative versus inferiority
Why is early childhood unique compared to older ages?
Exploring their emerging skills
What is the early childhood psychosocial task?
Initiative versus guilt
What is initiative?
Erik’s term for the early-childhood psychosocial task that involves exuberantly testing skills.
What did Erikson believe our mission is during pre-school?
To confidently exercise our bodies and minds
When does middle childhood begin?
Approximately at age 7
What is the challenge of middle childhood?
To develop industry
What is industry?
Erikson’s term for the middle childhood psychosocial task involving bending to adult reality and needing to work for what we want.
Is preschool devoted to exploring the world or working for what you want?
Exploring the world
What are bodies like in early childhood?
3 year-olds have large heads and squat, rounded bodies. Boys and girls are around the same size.
Name two types of motor skills
Fine and gross motor
What are the threats to preschool physical skills?
Lack of outdoor play and lack of food
What are the physical characteristics of middle childhood?
Longer bodies, limbs, and generally thinner
What is the mass to specific principle?
the progression from gross, random movements of the whole body to more refined movements of body parts
What are the motor milestones at age 2?
Walks unassisted, rolls or flings ball, feeds self with spoon, picks up small objects with thumb and forefinger
When do children usually walk unassisted?
Usually by 12 months
What are the motor milestones at age 4?
Cuts paper in approximate circle, walks down stairs alternating feet, catches and control large bounced ball
What are the motor milestones at age 5?
Writes name, walks without holding onto railing, tosses ball overhead with bent elbows
What are the motor milestones at age 6?
Copies two short words, hops on each foot but holds onto railing, catches and controls ball with arms in front of body
What are gross motor skills?
Large muscle movements such as running, climbing, and hopping
What are fine motor skills?
Small, coordinated movements such as buttoning a shirt, drawing faces, and writing name
What motor skills are boys slightly better at?
Throwing and hitting speed
What motor skills are girls slightly better at?
Hand eye coordination
What academic skills will a child be advances at if they have exceptional fine motor skills? And why?
Often math, due to conquering complicated mental steps, and finger dexterity helps finger manipulation to count
Why do some children lack outdoor play?
Adult anxiety, living in dangerous neighborhood, pressure to focus on academics at early age
What is Piaget’s preoperational stage?
Children’s perception are captured by their immediate appearances, what they see is what is real, inanimate objects are alive, etc
What are Vygotsky’s ideas about language?
We learn everything through inner speech
What are Piaget’s theories?
Through assimilation (fitting new information into our existing cognitive structures) and accommodation (changing those cognitive slots to match input from the world), children undergo qualitatively different stages of cognitive growth
What is preoperational thinking?
Piaget’s theory, children ages 2-7, an inability to step back from immediate perceptions and think conceptually
What is concrete operational thinking?
Piaget’s framework, children ages 8-11, ability to reason about the world in logical, adult ways
What are conservation tasks?
Piagetian tasks that involve changing the shape of substances to see if children can understand that the amount is still the same despite visual appearance
What are examples of conservation tasks?
Rows of pennies, balls of clay, glasses of liquid, dissolving sugar cubes
What is reversibility?
In Piaget’s conservation tasks, children do not understand, concrete operational child’s knowledge that a change in the way a substance looks can be reversed (you can change your hair or house decorations, but you change it back to the original state)
What is centering?
Child’s tendency to fix on the most visually striking feature of a substance and not consider other dimensions (such as the conservation of liquid task)
What is a schema?
A cognitive structure
What is decentering?
In Piaget’s conservation tasks, the concrete ability to look at several dimensions of an object or substance
What is class inclusion?
the understanding that a general category can encompass several subordinate elements
What is identity constancy?
inability to grasp that a person’s core self stays the same despite changes in external appearance
What is animism?
The belief that inanimate objects are alive
What is artificialism?
The belief that human beings make everything in nature
What is egocentrism?
Inability to understand that other people have different points of view from one’s own
In what areas was Piaget incorrect?
Piaget overstated young children’s egocentrism, children do not abandon animism by age 7, children do learn to conserve depending on location, teaching promotes cognitive growth
What was Vygotsky’s theory?
Zone of proximal development
What is the zone of proximal development?
The gap between children’s ability to solve a problem on their own and their potential knowledge if taught by a more accomplished person
What is scaffolding?
The process of teaching new skills by entering a child’s zone of proximal development and tailoring one’s efforts to that person’s competence level
American culture is teaching oriented, collectivist societies teach children by having them
watch and listen
What is inner speech?
silently repeating information or talking to yourself to regulate your behavior and master cognitive challenges
What are phonemes?
sound units that convey meaning in language such as the sound of the letter c
What are morphemes?
Smallest unit of meaning in a particular language (boys has two morphemes, “boy” and “s”)
What is mean length of utterance?
Average number of morphemes per sentence
What is syntax?
System of graummatical rules in langage
What is semantics?
The meaning system of a language, what words stand for, understanding word meanings
What is overregularization?
error in early language development, where rules for plurals and past tenses even to exceptions, so irregular forms sound like regular such as runned, goed, teached, sawed, mouses, feets, etc
What is overextension?
Error, apply verbal labels too broadly such as using horse to describe all four legged animals
What is underextension?
Error, verbal labels too narrow, your dog is the only dog, all other dogs must be called something else
