Development of the Young Child from Four-and-a-half to Seven Years

Between the ages of four-and-a-half and seven years, the young child is at the threshold of a new way of thinking of interacting with the world.  Piaget called this impending stage of the stage of “concrete operations.”  However, before children enter this stage, there is a wonderful time of development that is marked by playful imagination and a simultaneous need for information and concrete facts about anything and everything.  It is during this time we privileged to teach these children in the Kindermusik for the Young Child classroom.

Emotionally, children at this stage are generally exuberant, enthusiastic, adventuresome, and eager to explore the world around them.  Full of “high energy” would be an appropriate way to describe them.  They want to move, they need to move, and they will move despite the parameters around them.  In fact, they need a balance between times of vigorous activity and quiet times of relaxation.  This need is addressed in each of the Young Child lessons.

Cooperative play is blossoming now.  Children enjoy activities with other individual children or playing games in groups.  They seek gratification from one another now and look to the teacher as a facilitator, supporter, and enforcer of rules.  Children tend to be very aware of the fairness of a situation and expect the teacher to ensure that equality is the norm.  They seek clear and simple rules to help them function safely and comfortably in a given environment.  While children are now better at taking turns, it is still a good idea to keep all children actively involved whenever possible.

Continued language acquisition is a major development during this stage.  Language skills are flourishing as children chatter among themselves.  Grammatical construction tends to be fairly accurate, allowing children to enjoy conversation and brief discussions about what they are learning.  They love to use the extremes of their voices and to exaggerate spoken language.  They love to play with fantasy and humor.

Despite these new language skills, sensory experience remains the most important mode of learning.  They young child needs to touch, hear, feel, smell, taste, and see in order to continue to develop new neurological patterns that will shape his or her individual and subjective reality.  The process of sensory-motor integration is taking place and bringing the body under control without conscious effort.  Spatial awareness, balance, the ability to keep a beat, the expressive use of language, and crossing the midline are all important pre-reading skills the child needs to experience and practice now.

Particularly between the ages of five and six, growing competence and industriousness combine, and skill-oriented activities become popular.  Children now enjoy table games with cards, reciting the ABC’s, counting through the double digits, guessing games, and reading whatever he or she is capable of.  Thus, learning to read the rudiments of musical notation, playing melodic instruments, and learning patterned movement activities become highly motivating for the child.  At the same time that the child has a need to learn new information, he or she still has a great need to be successful at whatever is attempted.  Self-concept is being shaped as the child perceives “work” as successful or inadequate.

Throughout this period as the nervous system continues to change and reorganize itself, a gradual transformation is taking place within the young child.  The child becomes able to visualize the total of something from a single sensory stimulus, to make appropriate motor responses without conscious effort, and begins to decode written symbols.  Slowly, and at his or her own individual pace, a framework for reasoning and conceptualization is being constructed that will have a tremendous impact on all future learning.

Copyright 1998, Kindermusik International Inc, Do not reproduce….