Age Characteristics Chart

Age: Pre-Kindergarten to Kindergarten (ages 3-6)

Physical Development: During this period of life students are learning to master the use of their gross motor development, and they are developing fine motor skills. Mastering gross motor skills will give students the ability to run, jump, and play just like their older, more advanced counterparts. During this period some students can still have difficulty with such tasks as, hopping on one foot, walking backwards, skipping, jumping rope, as well as many others. Students will have difficulty with tasks that involve use of fine motor skills. Children must be taught how to hold a pencil, how to cut, tie shoes, and glue. All of these tasks involve the use of their fine motor skills, and therefore, prove very difficult until a child has achieved mastery.

During this stage, the students’ body is grossly out of proportion. The students head is a large percent of his body weight, and until the child reaches a growth spurt, it will remain that way.
Teaching Applications: During this period, any type of P.E. activity can be a learning experience for the child. It will provide them the opportunity to gain mastery of their gross motor skills. A good idea to remember is that when having students take part in activities, try to make them do some type of gross motor skill that they haven’t mastered yet. For example, in Kindergarten, instead of having the students run regular races have them do hopping, or skipping races.

Emotional Development: During this period students are taking their first steps toward independence. For most of them this will be their first time leaving their homes for long periods of time. The student must learn to cope with different types of stressors, such as leaving their parents, making friends, and learning about what it means to succeed and fail. Children will either be in Erickson’s stage of Initiative versus Guilt, or entering Erickson’s stage of Industry versus Inferiority. If they are still in the crisis of Initiative versus Guilt, then they will be using newly acquired language and motor skills to discover who they are. If they have proceeded into Industry versus Inferiority, then they will be focused on setting goals for themselves, and either achieving them, or failing at them and feeling inferior to those around them. Slavin (2003) writes that, “During this stage children start trying to prove that they are ‘grown-up’; in fact, this is often described as the I-can-do-it-myself stage,� (p. 82).

Teaching Applications: Give children the opportunity to use their skills to discover who they are. For example, letting students draw something that describes what they like to do, or even something as simple as writing a sentence about their favorite food, or color can help students achieve a sense of who they are, and understand that they are unique. Students at this age can use invented spelling to write sentences as long as they have a grasp of the alphabet sounds and symbols.


Social Development: During this period peers take and increasingly important role in the development. Slavin (2003) writes that, “Children’s relations with their peers differ in several ways from their interactions with adults,� (p. 73). This social interaction differs in that, it gives this age group the opportunity to interact with those at the same level of development, and it allows them to learn how to settle disputes since , “in a peer dispute, no one can claim to have ultimate authority,� (Slavin, 2003, p. 73). Because they must learn to resolve conflict, they must learn how their behavior affects the feelings of those around them, and take that into consideration. Children begin to take part in several types of play; solitary, associative, and cooperative. Students learn to cooperate in order to achieve a common goal, and in this way they learn how to work together, and how to take others opinion into consideration. Something that we take for granted, is that since this may be the first time the student has ever socialized with peers, the student may not understand what it means to compromise, or how to share. These skills will be developed during these years.

Teaching applications: I think that the best way to help students develop in this area is to give them the opportunity for play. One way to do this is to set up your classroom in stations. My classroom is set up for five stations and one of those stations is usually just for play. It is usually blocks, or legos, and it gives the students time to learn how to interact with each other. It is also good to have stations because I obviously cannot be at all of the stations at the same time, so the students must learn how to solve social problems independently.

Cognitive Development: During this period, students are in Piaget’s preoperational stage. It is during this stage that children can begin to use symbols to represent objects. This means that symbols can be understood as representations for sounds, and therefore the alphabet can be understood. Children begin to grasp the concept of numbers, and how they can represent any quantity of objects. Some important concepts that are understood are; conservation, centration, and reversibility. During this period students remain egocentric in their thinking. Slavin (2003) writes that, “Children at this stage believe that everyone sees the world exactly as they do,� (p. 36).

Teaching Applications: Because the students can use symbols to represent objects, teachers can begin teaching the alphabet, and manipulation of numbers.

References

Slavin, R. E., Educational Psychology, 2003, 7th Edition, p. 36, 73-82.