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Cognitive Development Activities

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Cognitive Development Activities

Cognitive development is critical in preparing children and adolescence to manage complexity. It is the growth of children's ability to think and reason. Cognitive development occurs differently from infancy through early childhood to adolescence. Brain development is an integral part of cognitive development. During infancy, young children use reasoning and memory abilities to construct meaning and organize their world. For instance, they learn to reach out, explore things around them like objects and focus their vision. These activities lay a foundation for more complex thinking processes in adolescence. Piaget called this stage formal logical operation (Beilin, 1994). This paper discusses cognitive development activities that enhance language, memory, reasoning, thinking, and problem-solving during infancy, early childhood, and adolescence.

Cognitive Development Activity for Infancy Room

One of the activities that will be incorporated into the infancy room is Farm Yard Jigsaw puzzle. This game requires a child to look for farm animals and farmers to grow his farm. It contains funny and lovable animals, with HD graphics and sound effects. The kid completes the puzzle by taking pieces from the left plane and dragging them to the correct location on the puzzle board. He earns an animal to place on his farm upon completing the puzzle. The more puzzles the kid plays, the more animals he collects. On the farm, he can see all the animals he won.

One of the milestones of this activity is the achievement of symbolic thought. The game allows the child to attach meaning to objects with language, vision, and spatial reasoning. Symbolic thought is a concept from Piaget’s theory that occurs in a preoperation stage. It is a type of thinking that enables a child to use words or object to represent something other than itself (Healthline Media, 2021). Playing the Farm Yard Jigsaw puzzle will improve children's cognitive development by increasing their comprehension, organizing ideas, and applying knowledge to choose and evaluate. Putting the pieces together requires concentration and enhance short-term memory and problem-solving.

Cognitive Development Activity for Early Childhood Room

The early childhood room will include Hopscotch to promote cognitive development. Hopscotch is a math-based activity for young children aged seven years that encourage children to solve arithmetic problems. The caretaker chalks out hopscotch squares on the floor or outside, then throws arithmetic problems and lets him hop to the answer. The milestone children will achieve through this activity is operational thought. This goal falls into Piaget’s concrete operational stage for children between ages 7 to 12 years. A milestone of this stage is using more methodological and logical manipulation of symbols by working thins inside their head. According to Ojose (2008), classification and seriation are crucial logical operations for understanding number concepts, and they develop during the concrete operational stage. Hopscotch will improve children thinking and problem-solving skills.

Cognitive Development Activity for Adolescent Room

We proposed open forums or discussion groups about current events and opinions about real-life topics such as personal freedom, academic excitations, drugs and alcohol use, sex, friends and peers, and other exciting topics. During the activity, a meeting will be planned and implemented during which teens will engage in discussions about the selected topic and later be asked to give solutions to problems. Adolescence marks the beginning of more complex processes and the capability to form hypotheses and deduce possible consequences (Cincinnati Children’s, 2021). A milestone in the formal operational stage is thinking about multiple variables, coming up with hypotheses, and using simples to understand the abstract. Notably, the child begins to develop abstract thought patterns, which allows children to execute reasoning using pure symbols without physically encountering things. Discussions will foster cognitive development in adolescents by increasing their thoughts about idealistic views on specific topics and more global concerns.

Overall, appropriate cognitive development activities encourage healthy cognitive growth throughout childhood. Caregivers should incorporate age-appropriate activities to improve the thinking, memory, and problem-solving skills of their children. In the first year, caretakers should base their relationship with toddlers around sounds and sights like matching puzzles. In early childhood, they should incorporate more concrete activities.

References

Beilin, H. (1994). Jean Piaget's enduring contribution to developmental psychology.

Cincinnati Children’s. (2021). Cognitive Development. https://www.cincinnatichildrens.org/health/c/cognitive

Healthline Media. (2021). What Are Piaget’s Stages of Development and How Are They Used?. https://www.healthline.com/health/piaget-stages-of-development#stages

Ojose, B. (2008). Applying Piaget's theory of cognitive development to mathematics instruction. The mathematics educator, 18(1). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ841568.pdf