The main aim of cognitive development is to help children develop their cognitive skills or processes and to progress towards logical thinking. Therefore, the major areas that need to be focused on are:
Sensory Development: It is stimulation of the five senses and its experiences.
Concept Formation: It is through stimulation and development of the following major cognitive skills:
Hence, at this stage it is very important to give children experiences to use their ‘cognitive skills’. This can be done through the development and process oriented approach.
Process Oriented approach in ECE: Process’ approach means that the focus is not on the content or subject matter which the child must learn and reproduce, but the focus is on development by the use of those processes which will equip the child to learn- how to learn. In other words, these experiences help sharpen the child’s mental skills. Subsequently, the child gets accustomed to using his mental skills like observation, reasoning etc. which will help him in the long run than simply teaching content. Also, practice in classification, seriation, sequential thinking, reasoning will provide the foundation for later learning of mathematics and science, apart from helping the child to adapt to the daily situations all through the life.
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