

As a result, school-age children start to develop and choose specific strategies for approaching a given learning task, monitor their comprehension of information, and evaluate their progress toward completing a learning task. By ages 5 to 7 years, children realize they can actively control their brains, and influence their ability to process and to accomplish mental tasks. However, their understanding of how a brain works is rather simplistic a brain is a simply a container (much like a toy box) where thoughts and memories are stored. Between ages 2 and 5 years, young children realize that they use their brains to think. Metacognition, "the ability to think about thinking", is another important cognitive skill that develops during early childhood. During this age, children's knowledge base also continues to grow and become better organized. For example, children can use their knowledge of the alphabet and letter sounds (phonics) to start sounding out and reading words. This expanding information processing capacity allows young children to make connections between old and new information. Children this age have also developed a larger overall capacity to process information. This skill is obviously crucial for children starting school who need to learn new information, retain it and produce it for tests and other academic activities.

For example, children can learn to pay attention to and memorize lists of words or facts.
EARLY CHILDHOOD TASK3 EXAMPLES HOW TO
Children ages 2 through 5 also start to recognize that are often multiple ways to solve a problem and can brainstorm different (though sometimes primitive) solutions.īetween the ages of 5 and 7, children learn how to focus and use their cognitive abilities for specific purposes. For example, children understand that a visit to the grocery store involves a specific sequences of steps: Dad walks into the store, gets a grocery cart, selects items from the shelves, waits in the check-out line, pays for the groceries, and then loads them into the car.

Scripts help children understand, interpret, and predict what will happen in future scenarios. Part of long-term memory involves storing information about the sequence of events during familiar situations as "scripts".
