Children who attend quality education are more likely to be better equipped for a successful future. They will have a healthy self-esteem and be encouraged to follow their interests.
Children also learn to cooperate with others in an environment that fosters socialization. School is often their first avenue to socialize outside of their immediate family. They begin to learn sociable practices such as cooperation, sharing and listening.
Social and emotional development
Social and emotional development is the way children build relationships with others. This includes forming attachments with family members and teachers and navigating emotions, such as anger and sadness. It also focuses on empathy, which helps kids understand other people’s perspectives.
Developing early social-emotional skills is essential because they help kids learn. They also give them the foundation they need for lifelong success. This is why it is important to keep kids engaged in learning.
Parents can support their child’s SEL by providing consistent, predictable experiences that include warm, affectionate interactions and clear communication. This will allow their children to build trusting relationships, soothe themselves when upset, share and play with others, and listen to instructions.
Children’s SEL skills are shaped by their environment, and teachers are often the biggest influencers. Teachers can support social-emotional development by fostering positive relationships, creating engaging learning environments, and teaching kids to manage their emotions in healthy ways. They can also support children by promoting a growth mindset, encouraging them to persevere through challenges, and teaching them to resolve conflicts peacefully.
Physical development
Children’s physical development includes both their growth and their ability to use their muscles and body parts for particular skills. It also involves the coordination of movement and balance. Physical development includes both gross (large muscle movements) and fine motor skills (small movements).
Children need to be physically healthy in order to learn well. This domain focuses on teaching children to take care of themselves and the world around them, including eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, washing hands correctly, covering their mouths when coughing or sneezing, and wearing protective gear for certain activities.
Children also develop their motor skills by playing games that involve catching, rolling, throwing, or hitting objects with their hands. This helps them gain control of their fine motor skills. They also learn to use the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain of their brains to help with coordination and movement, as well as supporting automatic vital body processes like breathing. They can use these skills to play with their friends or to perform simple math problems.
Cognitive development
According to Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, cognitive development progresses through four distinct stages. The first stage, the sensorimotor stage, occurs from birth to about 2 years. This period is characterized by the child’s ability to use symbols. Children are able to make one thing stand for something else, but they cannot think logically or solve problems. The preoperational stage takes place from around two to seven years. During this time, children can start to detach their thinking from the physical world and exhibit animism. They can also start to understand conservation of quantities.
They can begin to classify objects into sub-sets but cannot include them in more than one group at a time (class inclusion). Children can also become less egocentric and can reverse things mentally. At the concrete operational stage, children can use logical reasoning about concrete events but they cannot reason hypothetically. This last stage, dubbed the formal operational stage by Piaget, continues throughout life.
Language development
Language development is a vital aspect of children’s education as it allows them to communicate with their peers and teachers. It also helps them to understand the material that they are learning in their classrooms.
Infants are born ready to learn language and have innate tendencies toward communication and sociability. They start off by expressing themselves through cries and gestures, but soon learn how to use words to connect with others.
They pick up the sounds of their native language through exposure and learn about the grammar of that language through experience. This includes phonology (the rules about speech sounds) and semantics (the meaning of words).
From 18-24 months, children develop fast mapping which is their ability to associate new objects with familiar ones. They also begin to acquire single dimension adjectives such as tall-short, long-short and wide-narrow. During this time they may also overextend, where they will associate a noun with other things that have similar features.