Solitary Play, Associative Play And Cognitive Development

Early childhood years are considered the “play” years and the most important years in development. By age 3 they being to play more with others and use more elaborate imaginative scenarios. At this age they start to depend less on others and become more independent. They have their own theories and ideas on the world around them and sometimes feel theirs is the only/correct one. Not only do their skills and strength grow at this age, but so do their bonds between their friends and family. As children get older, they become more social and so does their play. By 5 they know how to join a play group, take turns, and make friends. There are five kinds of play: Solitary play, Onlooker play, Parallel Play, Associative play, and Cooperative …show more content…
“Preoperational thinking is magical and self-centered; pre-operational means that the child is not yet ready for logical operations (or reasoning processes)” (as cited, Berger, 250). According to Piaget, centration, focus on appearance, static reasoning, and irreversibility make logic thinking difficult at this age. Centration is when a child focuses on one aspect of a situation and excludes all others. For example, a child who watches two wide glasses get filled with water, then one glass transferred into a tall glass, will say the taller glass has more water. The second characteristic of preoperational thought is focus on appearance where to a child, a thing is whatever it appears to be. A boy may refuse to wear pink shirt because he thinks it will make a him a girl. Preoperational children use static reasoning and think their world is unchanging. They believe the way things are now will always be. Irrieversibility is when the child believes what’s done can’t be undone, especially when dealing with their food. A preschool student of mine doesn’t like ketchup and once argued that his hot dog was “ruined” even though the ketchup was wiped