Features of thinking of primary school children

Children in primary school have distinct and dynamic ways of thinking. Kids are starting to make sense of everything around them and explore the world in new ways at this age. They are learning how to connect ideas, solve problems, and think creatively in addition to simply absorbing facts.

Children’s thinking gets more structured as they move through the early school years. They begin to follow logical procedures, comprehend cause and effect, and be able to independently make simple decisions. This stage is critical for cognitive development because it establishes the groundwork for later, more sophisticated thought processes.

It is crucial for parents and educators to foster these new ways of thinking. Through providing assistance and motivation, they can foster children’s development of greater self-assurance in their capacity for critical thought and curious approach to problems. Knowing how elementary school students think will help you guide them more effectively during these crucial years.

Since their minds are still developing, primary school students process information more concretely and visually than adults do. They may have trouble understanding abstract ideas and frequently concentrate on minute details rather than the wider picture. Since most learning at this age is experiential, children benefit from practical exercises and well-illustrated materials that enable them to make connections between new concepts and their existing knowledge. Parents and educators can better support their child’s learning and development if they are aware of these aspects of their thinking.

Features

When entering school, children have different basic training: some studied in kindergarten, others sat at home, some were taught by parents or tutors, and some did not want to study at all. In order for the class to develop more or less evenly and smoothly, the teacher should level the knowledge of all children as much as possible. It is very difficult to do this, because all children have different development of thinking, their own age characteristics and different basic levels of knowledge. First of all, the teacher must understand how each person thinks and thinks, and then choose the style of presenting new material. In primary school, the amount of knowledge is not very large, but for a child it is a colossal burden, since his type of thinking changes, a large array of new information appears. At school age, new processes occur for which the child needs to be prepared, help him choose the right keys to learning.

Together with their physical growth, children also actively develop their psychological skills. They become more self-aware in society, learn how to get along with lots of other kids, and become adept at navigating a variety of challenging situations.

• with the emergence of new tasks, mental activity is characterized by rapid development;
• intellectual capabilities become more extensive. The child learns to perceive information, process it, structure it for further use;
• visual-figurative and visual-effective thinking acquire great importance and are actively developing in a younger schoolchild;
• verbal-logical thinking begins to occupy a significant part of the child"s mental activity;
• the development of all three forms of thinking (concepts, judgments, inferences) occurs gradually;
• the development of a base of basic concepts and terms in the process of educational activities;
• critical thinking is formed, the need to check one"s judgments;
• a division of the abstract and the real, the imaginary and the true arises, the child begins to realize what is real and what is not.

If a child’s primary means of learning and comprehending the world during their early years is through perception—tactile, taste, sound, and visual—memory becomes the dominant process during the preschool years. Kindergarteners actively learn about the world around them and are able to memorize poems, songs, letters, and numbers due to their strong memory. The thinking process is actively developed during the school years. The child learns to analyze what he has learned in addition to remembering it because of a certain foundation of knowledge and the circumstances that allow for the acquisition of new information.

The child’s ability to think helps him organize his memory and perception, which enables him to take in more information, comprehend its main ideas, and develop the ability to make inferences.

Types of thinking

The child has diverse perspectives on everything around him and everything that occurs to him as he develops. By the time he is six or seven years old, his mental and psychological development has reached a point where the school is able to successfully impart a great deal of new knowledge and skills on him. A teacher needs to be well-versed in the quirks of each student’s thought process in order to deal with them all with ease. Parents can benefit from this information if their child struggles academically.

As children get older, thinking takes center stage in psychological processes. Preschoolers tend to think primarily in visual-figurative ways, but as students get older, they start to think more conceptually and verbally logically. This is a long-term process that forms gradually.

Children still use ideas and pictures from their childhoods when they are in the first grade, but they are gradually learning to reason, think critically, make predictions, and use appropriate language.

Throughout elementary school, a child’s ability to think visually is maintained, but over time, they progress from recognisable sensations and images to a more sophisticated comprehension of the same phenomena.

Youngsters between the ages of 6 and 7 are still unable to consider all the features of an object or phenomenon; instead, they concentrate on the most salient aspect and ignore the others. This is the centralization principle, which forbids considering other people’s viewpoints. The child only sees his perspective, which he believes to be true. This characteristic gradually vanishes to make room for a different way of thinking.

Children build a knowledge foundation for the fundamental ideas they will use to think in the future as they learn new things and examine volume, weight, size, and other attributes. A new, more aware phase of thinking that is founded on knowledge rather than on visual-figurative experience starts around the age of 8 or 10. The development of conceptual or theoretical thinking starts at this age. From this point on, students are able to reason, apply previously taught concepts, examine different scenarios, and draw logical conclusions. They are able to accurately and methodically explain their ideas and conclusions because they have access to a pre-made vocabulary base.

Verbal-logical thinking is an evolution from a child’s visual perception of the world, which they experience in their first three to four years of life, to operating with images, which emerges in the preschool years, and finally operating with concepts at school, where students no longer rely on well-known images. Youngsters start to grasp the definitions of terms like "pride," "honor," etc.

Expanding one’s vocabulary enables one to articulate one’s thoughts clearly, support them with evidence, and consider them from a speaking perspective.

Three categories of thinking exist in psychology: concepts, judgments, and inferences.

Concept

A concept is the capacity to identify the key components of an object or phenomenon and to recognize what makes it fundamental. There are many different types of concepts, including individual and general, concrete and abstract, empirical and theoretical. A child’s ability to discern between various concepts in the objects around him helps him to better understand the world as he develops. Learning concepts is aided by parents, other kids, and real-world experiences.

A concept is not concrete; rather, it has an abstract, generalized form.

Judgement

A judgment is a concept expressed verbally. A child who is making a judgment denies or affirms any connections between real-world phenomena while examining their attributes. Judgments can be specific, general, individual, or false. The youngster gains the ability to discern between things around him, evaluate them, and form his own opinions by learning what is right and wrong, who might exhibit certain symptoms and who might not, and how to highlight a particular quality in someone in comparison to others;

Inference

The process of inferring a new conclusion about comprehensible and familiar objects from prior conclusions is known as inference. Individual, deductive, and analogous inferences are all possible. When a child uses individual inference, they take specific facts about an object and draw a broad conclusion from them. Working with an already-made fact and dissecting it into auxiliary little elements is the process of deductive inference. If certain parameters in a comparable phenomenon coincide, inference by analogy can be performed without accounting for other variables.

Although the fundamentals of critical thinking are still developing at this age, they are starting to take shape. It’s critical to employ suitable teaching strategies so that the child develops properly and the learning process moves along at the proper speed. At this age, games are the most effective way to develop a child.

Parents and teachers can more successfully support their primary school students’ learning if they have a better understanding of how they think. Children at this age are naturally curious and ready to learn about the world around them, but they frequently require assistance in order to improve their ability to solve problems and think logically.

It’s crucial to keep in mind that kids at this developmental stage think more practically and concentrate on what they can see and touch. They might still find abstract ideas difficult, so learning is frequently best when it is tied to practical applications and hands-on activities.

Children should be encouraged to think critically, ask questions, and express their opinions by their parents and teachers. By doing this, they assist kids in laying a strong foundation for later, more sophisticated thought processes. A nurturing atmosphere that encourages creativity and curiosity can have a significant impact on their growth.

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