After the first senso-motor stage, approximately two years later, the second stage of the four stages of child development according to Piaget. It is the preoperational phase and lasts up to seven years. In it the game is the center of life and the means of learning knowledge for children.
The most important thing about this period is that the child learns to speak correctly and understand what is said. The acquisition of language makes its way of thinking change and so does the way it relates to the environment.
He begins to be able to express not only very short words or phrases, but also acquires the ability to express himself with complex phrases, using the past, the future and the conditional, which clearly implies that new concepts make their way into his mind. However, their conversations are quite limited to their own experience and the exchange of opinions is limited.
However, logical thinking is not fully formed and its perceptions are purely objective, without the cause-effect relationship or comparisons being well defined. Try to give a logical explanation to the phenomena of your environment and experimentation is vital in this way.
AdvertisingThe vital experience will be the one that models your ability to think gradually and it will be the experiential, sensitive, emotional and playful experience the most important to move forward, much more than any repetitive exercise or attention to complex verbal explanations.
The perception of the senses is what accompanies your mental evolution and is what gravitates your thinking.
Language and its ability to drive, moving hand in hand with the construction of thought, allows you to develop more complex relationships with other people.
He has discovered the symbols but still does not know how to operate with them as an adult. The child may believe in the reality of his fantasies but he finds it impossible to assimilate that others do not interpret the world like him or that things have characteristics that can change without changing others, as the first video of this article exemplifies.
Other concrete examples of the way in which the child thinking in the preoperational stage We can see them in this second video.
I mentioned the enormous importance that the game has in all this preoperational stage. It is through playfulness that the child modifies his reflections on the environment and learns to modify it. And the game, in essence, is a free, vital, non-directed process, although in some cases, as it grows, it can integrate rules and other players.
But, in essence, preschoolers learn by playing, touching, feeling, not sitting at a desk or doing what they are told to do.
One of the things that, personally, seem to me most aberrant and far from the true needs of children are the famous cards. Young children are expected to spend many hours sitting and silent, without playing, learning concepts on paper, such as painting a sun or a blue sky yellow, when to learn that the sun is yellow and the blue sky is enough to be alive and to see them outdoors.
The child manages in these years to understand that their perceptions can be internalized and draw conclusions about the future or its consequences, but this is part of a process that will not be presented automatically and requires a lot of respect from adults to perform without forcing it.
In this preoperational stage, the second of the four stages of child development according to Piaget There are three fundamental achievements in the evolution of the individual: relationship with other people, appearance of thought and discovery of the intuition of the future.
