Jean Piaget's Preoperational Stage In Cognitive Development

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For my Child Interview Assignment I interviewed a little girl named Kyla that I know from my hometown. I know her through my mother, who is friends with her mom. Kyla is a kindergartener at Johnson Elementary School in Scottsburg, Indiana where I went to school when I was her age. During my interview with Kyla I asked her various questions to help insure I was going to be able to study the different aspects of her development needed for this assignment. The answers I got from her were very surprising to me because they were definitely not what I was expecting from her. However, they still tied into the theories we studied in class so I felt she had only made my assignment more interesting for me to do, which I was slightly happy about because …show more content…

During this stage in cognitive development Jean Piaget stated that during the ages two to seven children are “unable to distinguish others symbolic viewpoints from one’s own”(Berk, 2013). Kyla demonstrated this by acting as if the people in her life belonged to her as if they were objects instead of actual people. However, according to Piaget’s theory this is completely normal thinking for a child Kyla’s age. This same stage is evident in Kyla’s thinking when we discussed how she liked to color at school because she stated that she enjoys coloring pictures of herself. This lead me to believe that Kyla was beginning to use her drawing as a representation of her life as it is discussed in the book where it talks about Piagets …show more content…

I found the theories I researched to be very interesting and feel that they will prove to be very useful to me in the future when I begin my teaching career. The things I learned about only make me all the more eager to begin my career to learn more about how children think and develop as they grow older. In my personal opinion I feel that having the knowledge that I do from this assignment will help me to adjust my assignments for my future students to ensure that they get the best possible experience from my class one day. One big thing I learned was that not all children are going to develop at the same pace and it will be my job to personally help the students who are having a tougher time keeping up with their age group. One thing I wish that could have been different about this assignment is that I wish it would have required us to interview numerous children with different backgrounds so that we could have seen whether or not the development in each child Kyla’s age has the same mind capacity as she does. I feel that it would have been a great resource for us as future teachers so that we will know just how diverse each of our future students will be

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