For the Best only… That means Kim Woods the best on here !!Due today at 7pm Today Read the assignement before requesting plz. ” TV AND CHILDREN “

TV AND CHILDREN

To receive full credit, assignment must be doubled spaced, 12 point font, 3 pages, and turned in by due date. Proper grammar and English must be used. Please have someone proof read your paper in order to catch errors. And do not chage the margin settings, PLEASE!

We now live in an age where the average 18-year-olds come to college having spent as much time watching TV as attending school. In fact, some of these students’ school hours were spent watching TV! It is a rare individual under 25 years of age who did not grow up with at least one TV in the household. Television changed these children’s childhood. Did they learn from TV? What did they learn? Generate a list of benefits derived from being part of a television generation. Then make a list of things earlier generations of children did before TV became a major focus of entertainment in the family. What differences are there between the radio generation and the TV generation?

NO OUTSIDE SOURCES FROM PAY SITES OR PAY TEXT

The book you may use for this is

A CHILDS WORLD ( INFANCY THROUGH ADOLESCENCE ) 12TH EDITION

McGraw Hill (this txt book can be used)

http://www.life123.com/parenting/toddlers/toddler-development/positive-effects-of-television-on-kids.shtml

http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/tv.htm

The Good and Bad Effects of TV on Children

I enclosed links that are available that can assist with the topic, remember to read instructions and make a list and indentify items, i included a link to help

mcgraw hill connect

T H E H E N R Y J . K A I S E R F A M I LY F O U N D A T I O N

The Henry J. Kaiser

Family Foundation

2400 Sand Hill Road

Menlo Park, CA 94025

Phone: 650-854-9400

Fax: 650-854-4800

Washington Offi ce:

1330 G Street, NW

Washington, DC 20005

Phone: 202-347-5270

Fax: 202-347-5274

www.kff.org

The Kaiser Family Foundation is a non-profi t, private operating foundation dedicated to providing information
and analysis on health care issues to policymakers, the media, the health care community, and the general public.
The Foundation is not associated with Kaiser Permanente or Kaiser Industries.

The Effects of Electronic Media on Children Ages Zero to Six: A History of ResearchThe Effects of Electronic Media on Children Ages Zero to Six: A History of ResearchThe Effects of Electronic Media on Children Ages Zero to Six: A History of ResearchThe Effects of Electronic Media on Children Ages Zero to Six: A History of ResearchThe Effects of Electronic Media on Children Ages Zero to Six: A History of ResearchThe Effects of Electronic Media on Children Ages Zero to Six: A History of ResearchThe Effects of Electronic Media on Children Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research
Prepared for the Kaiser Family Foundation by the Center on Media and Child Health, Children’s Hospital BostonPrepared for the Kaiser Family Foundation by the Center on Media and Child Health, Children’s Hospital BostonPrepared for the Kaiser Family Foundation by the Center on Media and Child Health, Children’s Hospital BostonPrepared for the Kaiser Family Foundation by the Center on Media and Child Health, Children’s Hospital BostonPrepared for the Kaiser Family Foundation by the Center on Media and Child Health, Children’s Hospital BostonPrepared for the Kaiser Family Foundation by the Center on Media and Child Health, Children’s Hospital Boston

January 2005January 2005

INTRODUCTION

In today’s society, electronic media are thoroughly In today’s society, electronic media are thoroughly
integrated into the fabric of life, with television, integrated into the fabric of life, with television,
movies, videos, music, video games, and computers movies, videos, music, video games, and computers movies, videos, music, video games, and computers
central to both work and play. Recent studies central to both work and play. Recent studies central to both work and play. Recent studies
indicate that even the youngest children in the United indicate that even the youngest children in the United indicate that even the youngest children in the United
States are using a wide variety of screen media, States are using a wide variety of screen media, States are using a wide variety of screen media,
many at higher levels than recommended by child many at higher levels than recommended by child many at higher levels than recommended by child many at higher levels than recommended by child
development professionals (Rideout, Vandewater, & development professionals (Rideout, Vandewater, &
Wartella, 2003). There are rapidly growing markets Wartella, 2003). There are rapidly growing markets
for early childhood television programming, computer for early childhood television programming, computer
software for toddlers, and video series for infants.software for toddlers, and video series for infants.

Pediatricians, educators, researchers, and Pediatricians, educators, researchers, and
policymakers have raised particular concerns about
electronic media use among very young children.
Developmental science suggests that children may be
the most vulnerable between birth and school age to
certain negative effects of media use such as obesity, certain negative effects of media use such as obesity,
aggression, fear, and sleep disturbances. Paralleling aggression, fear, and sleep disturbances. Paralleling aggression, fear, and sleep disturbances. Paralleling
this vulnerability is a unique responsiveness to this vulnerability is a unique responsiveness to this vulnerability is a unique responsiveness to
educational programming that has been linked to educational programming that has been linked to
both immediate and long range educational benefi ts both immediate and long range educational benefi ts
(Anderson, Huston, Schmitt, Linebarger, & Wright
2001; Wright, Huston, Murphy, St Peters, Pinon et al,
2001).

Neurodevelopmental research indicates that, unlike
other organ systems, the human brain is embryonic at
birth – it completes the majority of its development, birth – it completes the majority of its development,
including the production of necessary and destruction including the production of necessary and destruction
of unnecessary neural architecture, in response to
environmental stimuli over the fi rst 18 to 24 months
of life. Stimuli that optimize the development of brain
architecture include interaction with parents and other
humans, manipulation of environmental elements
like blocks or sand, and creative, problem-solving
activities. Because screen media do not perform
any of these functions, the American Academy of
Pediatrics (AAP) offi cially state that the risks of
infants using media outweigh the benefi ts and thus
recommend against screen media use for children
zero to two years of age. Due to research evidence
linking media exposure to a variety of health risks from
obesity to violent behavior (Bushman & Huesmann,

2001; Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004), the AAP 2001; Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004), the AAP 2001; Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004), the AAP 2001; Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004), the AAP
also recommend that children two years of age and also recommend that children two years of age and also recommend that children two years of age and also recommend that children two years of age and
older be limited to one to two hours of electronic older be limited to one to two hours of electronic older be limited to one to two hours of electronic older be limited to one to two hours of electronic
entertainment per day (American Academy of entertainment per day (American Academy of entertainment per day (American Academy of entertainment per day (American Academy of
Pediatrics, 1999). Pediatrics, 1999).

Despite the attention the AAP policy received from Despite the attention the AAP policy received from Despite the attention the AAP policy received from Despite the attention the AAP policy received from
the press and the public, recent studies examining the press and the public, recent studies examining the press and the public, recent studies examining the press and the public, recent studies examining
media use by very young children have indicated media use by very young children have indicated media use by very young children have indicated media use by very young children have indicated
that the vast majority of parents have never heard that the vast majority of parents have never heard that the vast majority of parents have never heard that the vast majority of parents have never heard
of the recommendations and continue to allow and of the recommendations and continue to allow and of the recommendations and continue to allow and of the recommendations and continue to allow and
even encourage their very young children to use even encourage their very young children to use even encourage their very young children to use
screen media (Rideout, 2004; Rideout, Vandewater, screen media (Rideout, 2004; Rideout, Vandewater, screen media (Rideout, 2004; Rideout, Vandewater,
& Wartella, 2003). The & Wartella, 2003). The & Wartella, 2003). The Zero to SixZero to Six study found that Zero to Six study found that Zero to Six
74% of children under the age of two have watched 74% of children under the age of two have watched 74% of children under the age of two have watched 74% of children under the age of two have watched
television and 59% watch television on a typical television and 59% watch television on a typical television and 59% watch television on a typical
day for an average of two hours and fi ve minutes. day for an average of two hours and fi ve minutes. day for an average of two hours and fi ve minutes. day for an average of two hours and fi ve minutes.
Thirty percent of children zero to three years old Thirty percent of children zero to three years old Thirty percent of children zero to three years old Thirty percent of children zero to three years old
and 43% of children four to six years old have and 43% of children four to six years old have and 43% of children four to six years old have and 43% of children four to six years old have
televisions in their bedrooms. Those with screen televisions in their bedrooms. Those with screen televisions in their bedrooms. Those with screen
media in their bedrooms use media for more time media in their bedrooms use media for more time media in their bedrooms use media for more time
each day, and children in “heavy television” homes each day, and children in “heavy television” homes
read less and learn to read later than those in other read less and learn to read later than those in other
homes. Despite these data, more parents believe that homes. Despite these data, more parents believe that
television “mostly helps” rather than “mostly hurts” television “mostly helps” rather than “mostly hurts”
their children’s learning (43% vs. 27%) (Rideout, their children’s learning (43% vs. 27%) (Rideout,
Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003). Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003).

There is confusion about the effects of early media There is confusion about the effects of early media
use among those who care most for children’s health use among those who care most for children’s health
and well-being. Clearly a valid scientifi c research
foundation is necessary for parents, educators,
and child health professionals to make critical
decisions regarding media use by infants, toddlers,
and preschoolers. Unfortunately, compared to other
areas in health and education, research on the
effects of media use on very young children has not
been a consistent funding priority for the Federal
government1, foundations, or academic institutions.

The purpose of this issue brief is to review
the history of research about the effects of
electronic media on children zero to six years
old (including the funding sources), summarize
the fi ndings of the seminal studies in this area,
and note gaps in the research base.

METHODS OF OBTAINING AND
ORGANIZING RESEARCH INFORMATION

In order to identify research relating to the effects
of electronic media on zero- to six-year olds, several
searches were conducted. For data on government
funded research, a search of the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation
(NSF) award databases was performed.2 Data on
non-government funding were obtained by examining
the funders listed in research publications addressing
media effects on children zero to six years old. If
funders, dates, or amounts were not identifi ed in
a publication, authors were contacted directly and
asked to provide the information. Funding data for
this report are limited to research funded within
the United States that resulted in peer-reviewed
publications or technical reports.3 Funding awards
were summarized by decades, but if a grant period
extended across two or more decades it was only
counted in the decade in which it was awarded.

To locate the research, the names of Principal
Investigators from the government grants were
searched in the academic databases PsycINFO,
ERIC, Academic Search Premier, and MEDLINE
in order to fi nd published research that may have
been funded by the identifi ed grants. Additionally,
searches of these databases were performed with the
same search terms as the funding search in order to
fi nd relevant publications that may not have received
government funding. Only peer-reviewed publications
that included participants six years of age or younger
were included in the research review. Theses,
dissertations and technical reports were excluded.
In order to be comprehensive, all research literature
examining the subject was reviewed. Studies
considered central to important research areas from
each decade were summarized in this report. A
full list of all reviewed studies can be found in the
reference list. Starting from the fi rst research in this
area, which was done in the 1960s, and extending
to the present, the review of fi ndings is organized by
decades to show the theoretical and methodological
evolution of the research.

HISTORY OF RESEARCH ON THE
EFFECTS OF ELECTRONIC MEDIA ON
CHILDREN ZERO TO SIX YEARS OLD

In the 1960s, research about media effects on
children zero to six years of age was in its infancy.
Few studies were conducted and fewer grants
awarded. However, since the 1970s, the number
of grants awarded to support research in this area
has been remarkably consistent. The majority of
funding has been awarded by the Federal government
through the NIH or the NSF. The number of grants
awarded each decade from the 1970s to the 1990s
varied only slightly (22, 20, and 27, respectively).
What has differed is the distribution of funds across
government and non-government sources. In the
1970s and 1980s, more funding was awarded
from government than non-government sources.

In the 1990s, very few government grants were
awarded in comparison to the non-government
support provided. By the 2000s, the government
has returned to funding this area of research, across
more organizations than ever before, and the non-
government support continues. The number of
research grants awarded in the 2000s already
equals the average awarded during each of the three
preceding decades.

The 1960s

The Funding
During the 1960s, none of the research published
in this area identifi ed dates in which funding was
awarded. Funders for this work included both
government and non-government sources. Of
the seven grants that were given, fi ve came from
NIH, two of which were from the National Institute
of Mental Health (NIMH). The other two grants
came from Stanford University and the American
Association of University Women.

The Research
Most research on media effects on zero- to six- year-
olds in the 1960s was heavily infl uenced by Social
Learning Theory. First described by Bandura and
Walters in 1963, this theory profoundly infl uenced
media effects research. The basic premise of the
theory is that children learn through observation.
Applied to media effects research, Social Learning
Theory predicts that children can learn new behaviors
from television and other audiovisual media.

Seminal media studies of the 1960s found that
young children learned and reproduced specifi c
acts of aggression they observed on fi lm. A series
of experiments demonstrated that children imitate
aggressive acts they saw on fi lm, especially when
the aggressive model (adult performing acts of
aggression) is rewarded or no adverse consequences
are depicted.

Specifi c Findings

• Four- to six-year-old children were exposed for fi ve

minutes to an aggressive or non-aggressive fi lm.
After watching the fi lm, the children were invited
to play with a ball or a mechanical doll apparatus,
in which pressing a bar caused one doll to hit
the other on the head. Children exposed to the
aggressive fi lm pressed the bar to activate the
hitting dolls more often than children who had
been exposed to a non-aggressive fi lm (Lovaas,
1961).

• Children aged three to fi ve years observed either a
live adult aggressive model, a fi lmed adult aggres-
sive model, a fi lmed adult aggressor dressed like
a cartoon character, or no model (control). They
were subsequently frustrated (prohibited from play-
ing with attractive toys) and taken to another room,
where their free play was observed. Children in the
three aggression groups displayed more aggres-
sion than children in the control group. Children
who observed aggressive fi lmed models displayed

January 2005 Page 2The Effects of Electronic Media on Children
Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research

as much aggression as children who observed
aggressive live models (Bandura, Ross & Ross,
1963).

• Children aged three to fi ve years imitated a
televised aggressive model when the model was
rewarded or no consequences to the model were
depicted. When the model was punished, children
did not imitate the aggression (Bandura, Ross &
Ross, 1963).

• Children aged three to six years imitated all physi-
cal and verbal behaviors of a televised model when
they were directly rewarded for doing so. However,
they displayed signifi cantly less imitative aggres-
sion when the televised model was punished than
when they saw the model rewarded or suffer no
consequences. Thus, all children had learned the
aggressive behaviors, but the children who saw
the model rewarded or suffer no consequences
were most likely to perform the aggressive acts
(Bandura, 1965).

• Children aged fi ve to nine years who watched an
aggressive model on fi lm while the experimenter
provided negative comments were less likely than
those who heard positive or neutral comments to
be aggressive when taken to a playroom, but this
inhibition occurred only if the experimenter accom-
panied the child to the playroom (Hicks, 1968).

The 1970s

The Funding
Support for research during the 1970s was charac-
terized by more government than non-government
awards. Of the 22 grants that were awarded, 15
were given by government sources. The remain-
ing seven grants were awarded by non-government
sources. The primary government funder during
the 1970s was NIH. Within NIH, NIMH provided
the most support, awarding ten of the 11 grants
given by the agency.4 The NSF and the Offi ce of
Child Development also awarded grants during this
time. Non-government funders during the 1970s
included foundations, universities and non-profi t
groups. Foundation support was provided by the
Spencer Foundation and the Markle Foundation.
University support was given by the University of
Wisconsin – Madison, the University of Washington
and the University of Minnesota. Non-profi t support
came from Children’s Television Workshop (CTW).
Several studies were published during the 1970s
for which funding dates could not be determined.
Funders of these studies included the Federal Trade
Commission, the National Institute of Child Health
and Human Development (NICHD), NIMH, the
National Institute of Education, the Offi ce of Child
Development, the University of Kansas and Field
Enterprises Educational Corporation. In addition, four
studies were published in the 1970s without funding
support.

The Research
In the 1970s, there was an explosion of studies ap-
plying Social Learning Theory to new research areas.
The power of television to teach young children was
established through two important events of the
decade. First, television’s ability to teach aggressive
behavior through modeling was a major component of
the 1972 Surgeon General’s Report (Murray, 1972).
Second, Sesame Street, originally aired in 1969 and
the focus of several studies in the 1970s, demonstrat-
ed that TV could be a powerful teacher of academic
and social skills. Numerous research reports com-
missioned by Children’s Television Workshop during
the 1970s also established the value of formative
research for creating effective educational programs
for children. Finally, in the 1970s, researchers began
systematically studying the effects of specifi c ele-
ments of children’s media exposure, including media
violence, attention/comprehension, response to ad-
vertising, and infants’ responses to media.

Specifi c Findings

Media violence
• Three- to fi ve-year-old boys randomly assigned

to watch violent Superman or Batman cartoons
at their nursery school once a day, three days a
week, for four weeks, were more aggressive and
less cooperative during a social interaction test
situation than three- to fi ve-year-old boys who
were randomly assigned to watch Mister Rogers’
Neighborhood during the same four week period Neighborhood during the same four week period Neighborhood
(Friedrich & Stein, 1973).

• Preschool boys who watched a 3.5 minute fi lm
depicting aggressive play with a clown interacted
more aggressively with the clown from the fi lm
during free play immediately after viewing. Boys
in pairs acted more aggressively than boys alone,
suggesting that imitation of modeled aggressive
behavior may increase when children play in pairs
(Drabman & Thomas, 1977).

• Five-year-old children imitated aggressive and
neutral behaviors observed on fi lm, regardless of
the experimenter’s positive, negative, or neutral
comments about aggressive behaviors. Ten-year-
olds were more likely to imitate aggressive and
neutral behaviors when the experimenter made
positive or neutral comments about the behaviors
than when the experimenter made negative
comments (Grusec, 1973).

• Five to 12-year-old boys who watched less than
four hours of television per week were more
aroused (as measured by galvanic skin response
and change in blood volume) by viewing media
violence than boys who watched more than 25
hours per week, suggesting heavy viewers had
been desensitized by prior media violence
exposure (Cline, Croft & Courier, 1973).

January 2005 Page 3The Effects of Electronic Media on Children
Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research

• After watching an action adventure TV show, only
three percent of kindergarteners and fi rst graders
mentioned motives or motives and consequences
in describing the aggression in the show,
compared to 63% of fi fth and eighth graders.
When asked to evaluate the aggressor, only 3% of
kindergarteners and fi rst graders included motives
in their evaluations, compared to 70% of fi fth and
eighth graders. Sixty-seven percent of kindergar-
teners recounted only scenes containing
aggression when describing the plot of the show
(Collins, Berndt & Hess, 1974).

School achievement
• Children who watched more television at ages

three, four, and fi ve (according to parental
estimates) had lower grades and were rated as
less sociable by their peers at age six (Burton,
Calonico, & McSeveney, 1979).

Prosocial media
• Preschoolers exposed to episodes of Mister

Rogers’ Neighborhood for eight weeks engaged in Rogers’ Neighborhood for eight weeks engaged in Rogers’ Neighborhood
more imaginative play and positive social interac-
tions when also provided with program-related play
materials with prosocial themes, such as dramatic
play props. Viewing Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
alone did not increase imaginative play or social
interactions (Friedrich-Cofer, Huston-Stein, Kipnis,
Susman, & Clewett, 1979).

Attention and comprehension
• One- to four-year-old children’s attention to tele-

vision varies by child and program characteristics.
Percent attention to Sesame Street in the lab was Sesame Street in the lab was Sesame Street
dramatically higher among four-year-olds com-
pared to one-year-olds. Particular characteristics
of the program, such as children, puppets, peculiar
voices, and lively music, were correlated positively
with children’s visual attention to the screen
(Anderson & Levin, 1976).

• Five-year-olds who watched Sesame Street in the Sesame Street in the Sesame Street
presence of toys paid half as much attention to the
TV screen as fi ve-year-olds who watched the same
program without toys. However, comprehension
was the same for both groups, suggesting that
young children monitor the audio track of television
programs for cues indicating content that interests
them and distribute their visual attention
strategically (Lorch, Anderson & Levin, 1979).

• Preschoolers who watched a rapidly paced version
of Sesame Street did not differ from preschoolers Sesame Street did not differ from preschoolers Sesame Street
who watched a normally paced version on mea-
sures of hyperactivity, impulsivity and shortened at-
tention span immediately after viewing (Anderson,
1977).

Response to advertising
• Seventy percent of four- and fi ve-year-old children

who watched a preschool program with a toy
commercial placed near the beginning and end
of the program said they would rather play with
the advertised toy than with their friends in the

sandbox. Only 36% of children who saw the same
program without the commercials preferred playing
with the toy to playing with friends (Goldberg &
Gorn, 1978).

• The total number of hours of commercial TV
viewed per week by three- to eleven-year-old
children (average age four to seven) predicted how
many product requests they made at the super-
market. Children who watched more TV made
more attempts to infl uence what was purchased at
the store (Galst & White, 1976).

• Most kindergarteners did not comprehend
disclaimers like “some assembly required” in a
commercial. When the phrase “you have to put it
together” was used, two times as many
children understood the message (Liebert,
Sprafkin, Liebert, & Rubinstein, 1977).

• When shown segments of a videotape contain-
ing children’s programs and commercials, fi ve- to
seven-year-old children correctly revealed whether
they were watching “part of the show” or a
“commercial” about 55-65% of the time, just
above what would have been expected by chance.
Separation devices between programs and
commercials, such as a character saying “we’ll be
right back after these messages” did not increase
the likelihood that children would distinguish
between commercials and programs (Palmer &
McDowell, 1979).

Infants’ responses to media
• In a laboratory experiment, six-month-old infants

who were directly exposed to TV for about one
hour each day (according to parental report)
looked more at a television with picture and sound
than at a picture-only version (Hollenbeck & Slaby,
1979).

The 1980s

The Funding
Research funding during the 1980s was
characterized by more government than non-
government support. Of the 20 grants that were
awarded during this decade, 12 were provided by
government sources. The remaining eight grants were
awarded by non-government sources. The primary
government funder during the 1980s was NIH. Nine
of the 11 NIH grants were given by NIMH.5 The NSF
awarded one grant during this decade. Foundations
awarded the majority of the non-government support,
with universities, non-profi t groups and professional
organizations providing the remainder. In particular,
the Spencer Foundation awarded three grants.
University funding came from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, and Arizona State University.
Non-profi t support was provided by Doctors Ought
to Care and CTW, and the National Association of
Broadcasters, a professional organization, funded
one study. A number of studies were published
during the 1980s for which funding dates could
not be determined. Funders of this work included

January 2005 Page 4The Effects of Electronic Media on Children
Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research

NICHD, NIMH, the US Department of Education,
the University of Kansas, the University of Colorado
Denver, Auburn University, University of Connecticut
Research Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. Arthur Foundation. Arthur
In addition, seven published studies were conducted
without grant support.

The Research
In the 1980s, NIMH, following up on the 1972
Surgeon General’s Report, commissioned a series
of summary articles about the effects of media on
children (Pearl, Bouthilet, & Lazar, 1982). Research
in the 1980s focused on developing a variety of
topics that were fi rst explored in the 1970s, including
attention/comprehension, fear reactions to frightening
content, response to advertising, and infants’
responses to media. The fi rst investigations of video
game effects and on positive interventions on media
use were also done in the 1980s.

The major discovery of the 1980s was that children’s
attention to television is determined by how well they
understand program content. In particular, cognitive
developmental factors strongly infl uence how children
are affected by television. In other words, children’s
cognitive development predicts their selective
attention to television and, by extension, their ability to
learn from television.

Specifi c Findings

Attention and comprehension
• Two-, three-and-a-half-, and fi ve-year-old children

were exposed to comprehensible and incompre-
hensible video clips of Sesame Street. The incom-
prehensible clips included randomly reordered
scenes, foreign language, or backwards speech.
Children’s attention to the incomprehensible
segments was signifi cantly less than to normal
Sesame Street segments, indicating that when Sesame Street segments, indicating that when Sesame Street
television content is not understandable to
children, they pay less attention to it (Anderson,
Lorch, Smith, Bradford & Levin, 1981).

• Three- to seven-year-old children displayed com-
prehension of audiovisual sequences conveyed
through cinematic techniques, such as editing and
special effects. Children were asked to recreate
stop-motion animation fi lm segments with the
dolls in the fi lm. Cinematic techniques such as
pans, zooms, and cuts did not impair children’s
reproduction of the fi lm events, although a greater
proportion of seven-year-olds than four-year-olds
clearly understood the sequence of events (Smith,
Anderson & Fischer, 1985).

• As a child looks at the television screen, the
probability of looking away from the television
decreases over time. Children are least vulnerable
to distraction when engaged in long looks at
television. This research led to the theory of
attentional inertia, which states that the longer
a viewer looks at the television screen, the
probability of that look continuing increases
(Anderson, Choi, & Lorch, 1987).

• The proportion of time that children look directly at
the television screen increases during the pre-
school years, reaching about 70 percent during el-
ementary school and then leveling off. This refl ects
children’s growing comprehension of television
content with increasing cognitive development
(Anderson, Lorch, Field, Collins, & Nathan, 1986).

• Family characteristics infl uence young children’s
viewing of educational programs. Family television
viewing diaries revealed that viewing of Sesame
Street increased from age three to three-and-half Street increased from age three to three-and-half Street
to four years, decreasing thereafter. Maternal
employment, preschool attendance, and older
siblings in the family (for 3-year-olds) predicted
less Sesame Street viewing, whereas younger Sesame Street viewing, whereas younger Sesame Street
siblings in the family (for 5-year-olds) predicted
more viewing (Pinon, Huston & Wright 1989).

• Children’s attention to particular characteristics of
a pro-social television program predicted compre-
hension of that program. After viewing a pro-social
cartoon, children in kindergarten, third, and fourth
grade answered a series of questions about the
depicted story. Kindergarteners’ comprehension
refl ected attention to the television in response to
salient auditory cues like sound effects, whereas
older children’s comprehension refl ected attention
during sequences containing child dialogue and
action (Calvert, Huston, Watkins & Wright, 1982).

• Violence and action contribute independently to
preschoolers’ attention to television and to their
social behaviors after viewing. Imaginative play
increased after children saw a low action/low
violence program or no television, but decreased
after a high action/high violence program.
Aggressive behavior increased after viewing high
action/high violence or high action/low violence
programming (Huston-Stein, Fox, Greer, Watkins &
Whitaker, 1981).

• Preschoolers (three- to fi ve-year-olds) can learn
novel words from television. Five-year-olds learned
more words from television than three-year-olds
(Rice & Woodsmall, 1988).

TV viewing and aggression
• Preschoolers who had behavior problems in

school watched more television than children who
did not have behavior problems in school; these
aggressive children also specifi cally watched more
violent action-adventure programs and less
pro-social programs, like Mister Rogers’
Neighborhood (Singer & Singer, 1980).Neighborhood (Singer & Singer, 1980).Neighborhood

Fear reactions to frightening content
• Children’s fear reactions to media content refl ect

their level of cognitive development. Parents re-
ported in a survey that preschoolers (three- to four-
year-olds) were most afraid of media content that
looks scary (such as fantasy or fi ction), whereas
older children were most afraid of things that could
really happen, even if they did not appear very
scary (Cantor & Sparks, 1984).

January 2005 Page 5The Effects of Electronic Media on Children
Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research

• Cognitive strategies like “tell yourself it’s not real”
were less effective at reducing fright reactions to
media content among preschoolers compared
to older children. “Non-cognitive” strategies like
holding a blanket were more effective among
preschoolers than older children (Wilson, Hoffner,
& Cantor, 1987).

Response to advertising
• After viewing commercials for no-sugar-added

snacks (milk and fruit) and public service an-
nouncements promoting nutrition simultaneously
with positive comments by an adult observer,
three- to six-year-old children chose snacks con-
taining added sugar less frequently than children
who watched either commercials for snacks with
added sugar (with or without adult comment on
their poor nutritional value) or commercials for
no- sugar-added snacks without adult positive
comment (Galst, 1980).

• Preschoolers were more aggressive after viewing
commercials with high salience formal features
(high action, fast pace, and many visual changes)
than after viewing commercials with low salience
formal features (Greer, Potts, Wright, & Huston,
1982).

• The phrase “part of a balanced breakfast” often
used in cereal ads, was misunderstood by young
children; it gave them the false belief that cereal
by itself is a healthy, complete meal (Palmer &
McDowell, 1981).

• Nine out of ten (91%) three- to fi ve-year-olds cor-
rectly used the term “commercial” to identify an
advertisement, but only three in ten (31%) under-
stood that the commercial wasn’t part of the story
of the program that preceded it (Kunkel, 1988).

Infants’ responses to media
• Fourteen- and 24-month-old infants imitated

specifi c manipulations of toys performed by adults
on video, immediately after viewing the video and
24 hours later (Meltzoff, 1988).

Effects of video games and computers on
young children
• Four- to six-year-old children engaged in more

aggressive acts and fewer pro-social acts after
watching the Road Runner cartoon or playing the Road Runner cartoon or playing the Road Runner
video game Space Invaders compared to during
baseline free play. There were no differences
in aggression or pro-social behavior between
watching TV and playing video games (Silvern &
Williamson, 1987).

• Three- to fi ve-year-old children used commercially
available pre-reading skills computer software
with or without adult assistance for three twenty-
minute sessions in their preschool classrooms.
No differences were found in the children’s
pre-reading concepts before and after using the
software, and adult assistance had no effect on

children’s test scores. Children expressed little
interest in the computer, as compared to books
or toys, after the sessions (Goodwin, Goodwin,
Nansel, and Helm, 1986).

Intervention on media effects
• Reducing young children’s television time may

increase their scores on IQ and Matching
Familiar Figures tests, as well as their time spent
reading. Families with six-year-old children were
randomly assigned to either a restricted viewing or
unrestricted viewing group. For six weeks, parents
decreased viewing by half among children in the
restricted group; these children had higher test
scores (tested within one week of the end of the
experiment) than pretest matched peers in the
unrestricted group (Gadberry, 1980).

The 1990s

The Funding
Funding for research in the 1990s was characterized
by a signifi cant decrease in government support.
Of the 27 total grants that were awarded during
this decade, only fi ve were awarded by government
agencies. The remaining 22 grants were awarded by
non-government sources. The primary government
funder in the 1990s was NIH, which awarded
three grants, all from NICHD. NSF and the U.S.
Department of Education (USDE) each awarded one
grant during this decade. Non-government funders
in the 1990s included foundations, universities, the
media industry, and non-profi t groups. The greatest
support for research was provided by a single
corporation in the media industry. Viacom subsidiaries
Nickelodeon and Nick Jr./MTV awarded eight grants.
Non-profi t support was provided by CTW, The Public
Broadcasting System (PBS), and the American
Heart Association. Foundation support came from
the Annenberg Foundation, the Charles Revson
Foundation, and the Markle Foundation. University
support included the University of Wisconsin –
Madison, Kansas State and the University of New
Hampshire. Several studies were published during
the 1990s for which the date of funding could not
be identifi ed. The funders for this work included the
University of Illinois, the University of North Carolina,
the University of Kentucky, Yale University, the
University of Massachusetts – Amherst, the University
of California – Santa Barbara, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco,
the MacArthur Foundation, and Connecticut Public Arthur Foundation, and Connecticut Public Arthur
Television. In addition, 13 published studies were
conducted without identifi ed funding support.

The Research
An interdisciplinary approach dominated the
investigation of media effects on young children
during the 1990s. Scientists from a variety of fi elds,
including psychology, education, communication,
public health, epidemiology, and medicine, applied
their discipline’s theoretical and methodological
approaches to this research. Longitudinal designs
became more prevalent, discovering familial and
contextual infl uences on the development of

January 2005 Page 6The Effects of Electronic Media on Children
Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research

children’s media habits and documenting long-term
effects of educational television. Finally, a biomedical
perspective was applied, with researchers measuring
children’s physiological responses to television
and documenting the physical and mental health
outcomes of television use.

Specifi c Findings

Attention and comprehension
• In a study of 40 fi ve-year-olds, children were

instructed to watch Sesame Street and simul-Sesame Street and simul-Sesame Street
taneously stop an intermittent buzzer. Children
responded more slowly when the content of the
segment was comprehensible than when it was
in gibberish or a foreign language, affi rming that
children’s comprehension of televised content
drives their attention to it (Lorch & Castle, 1997).

• Using time-lapse photography to measure the

viewing of 50 children (aged two, fi ve, eight
and twelve years), researchers looked at the
relationship between children’s looking at the
screen and formal features of the program. Cuts,
movement, and purposeful character behaviors
were all related to children’s visual attention
(Schmitt, Anderson & Collins, 1999).

• Children’s comprehension of television
programming is higher when they are engaged,
and their attention is maximized if information is
provided in both the auditory and visual modes
(Lorch & Castle, 1997; Rolandelli, Wright, Huston
& Eakins, 1991).

• The relationship between children’s television
use and other activities varies as a function
of the content of the program. Entertainment
television viewing was related to fewer educational
activities and less social interaction. There was no
relationship between educational television and
any of these activities (Huston, Wright, Marquis &
Green, 1999).

Television and reality
• In a study of two- and two and one-half-year-old

children, participants watched a monitor showing
an experimenter hide a toy in a room. Children
were asked to fi nd the toy in the actual room
shown on the monitor. Younger children completed
the task with signifi cantly more errors, illustrating
their diffi culty in using information from a televised
event to understand a real-life situation (Troseth &
DeLoache, 1998).

• The ability for children to learn from televised
images lags behind the ability to learn from live,
observed events. One hundred and eight children
(12 months, 15 months, or 18 months of age) saw
either a televised or live experimenter remove a
mitten from a puppet and shake it to ring a bell.
When given the identical puppet to play with, either
immediately or twenty-four hours later, children who
had seen the live performance were more likely to
imitate the action (Barr & Hayne, 1999).

• Older children have more sophisticated
understandings of the visual codes of television.
Three-year-olds often mistake television images
for real items residing within the TV set, while
four-year-olds can recognize televised images as
pictorial representations (Flavell & Flavell, 1990).
Five-year-olds, while less skilled than seven-year-
olds, are able to use features of television to
determine if programs are providing information
that is factual (news programs or documentaries)
or fi ctional (dramas) (Wright, Huston Reitz &
Piemyatet, 1994).

Television and learning
• Sesame Street viewing was found to be benefi cial Sesame Street viewing was found to be benefi cial Sesame Street

to children’s vocabulary development. A two-year
longitudinal study followed two cohorts of children
(160 three- to fi ve- year- olds and 166 fi ve- to
seven- year-olds). Children who spent more time
viewing Sesame Street (as measured with viewing Sesame Street (as measured with viewing Sesame Street
diaries) achieved higher scores on a picture test
of vocabulary, regardless of parental education,
family size, gender, and parental attitudes. This
relationship was stronger for the three- to fi ve-
year-old cohort than for the fi ve- to seven-year-old
cohort (Rice, Huston, Truglio & Wright, 1990).

• With repeated exposure to single episodes of
educational television, children’s comprehension
and thinking skills were found to be enhanced
without loss of attention. Forty four-year-old
children viewed the same Sesame Street
videotape once a week for three weeks. Repeated
viewing was associated with better comprehension
of the tape’s content (Sell, Ray, & Lovelace 1995).
Children aged three to fi ve years were randomly
assigned to view a Blue’s Clues episode once or
for fi ve consecutive days. Children’s attention to
the program remained constant, but their verbal
and non-verbal interactions with the program
and comprehension of its content increased with
repetitive viewing (Crawley, Anderson, Wilder,
Williams & Santomero, 1999).

Viewing habits and family environment
• In a two-year longitudinal study of children’s

viewing habits, multiple one-week television
viewing diaries were completed for 326 children in
two cohorts (three- to fi ve- and fi ve- to seven-year-
olds). Children’s viewing patterns changed very
little over the course of the study. While results
showed that as children aged they viewed more
cognitively demanding programs, the researchers
concluded that family characteristics were the
strongest contributors to viewing patterns (Huston,
Wright, Rice, Kerkman & St. Peters, 1990; Truglio,
Murphy, Oppenheimer, Huston & Wright, 1996).

• A longitudinal study of children’s television use
found that children tend to watch adult programs
in the presence of their parents and child programs
without their parents present (St. Peters, Huston,
Wright, & Eakins, 1991). Furthermore, the more
time children spent co-viewing with parents, the
less time they spent watching PBS educational

January 2005 Page 7The Effects of Electronic Media on Children
Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research

programs (Taras, Sallis, Nader & Nelson 1990).
These fi ndings underscore the idea that children’s
viewing is often determined by their parents’ view-
ing habits.

Fear reactions to frightening content
• In a study of 163 fi ve- to nine-year-olds,

researchers found that children experienced more
fear when they believed that a televised threat
existed locally (Cantor & Hoffner, 1990). Results
from a telephone survey of 285 parents of school-
aged children found that older children were more
frightened by news stories and less frightened
by fantastic content than were younger children
(Cantor & Nathanson, 1996). In a study of 186
children in two age groups (fi ve to seven and
nine to twelve years), prior knowledge of a happy
ending to a scary event was shown to reduce
children’s fear (Hoffner & Cantor, 1991). Viewing
a suspenseful program with an older sibling was
shown to reduce the young child’s arousal (Wilson
& Weiss, 1993).

Response to advertising
• Children as young as two years old were found to

have established beliefs about specifi c brands that
are promoted by television advertising and parental
behavior (Hite & Hite, 1995). Young children (three
to six years old) were shown to have the ability to
recognize brand logos for all types of products
(over 50% were able to identify “Old Joe Camel”).
The ability to recognize brand logos was increased
with television viewing, with age, and when visual
cues were used in advertising (Fischer, Schwartz,
Richards, Goldstein, Rojas, 1991; Henke, 1995;
Macklin, 1994).

Health outcomes
• Viewing frightening television, even programming

deemed appropriate for preschoolers, raised
children’s heart rates and caused symptoms of
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In a survey
study of 116 parents of three- to fi ve-year-olds,
40% of parents reported at least one symptom of
PTSD that occurred after a child viewed a scary
event on television and that lasted at least a month.
Sleep diffi culties were one of the most common
symptoms (Crum, 1994; Groer & Howell, 1990).

• For a study of physical activity, the behaviors of 191
three- to four-year-olds were directly observed for
up to four days a year for four years. Researchers
found that the more time children spent watching
television, the less likely they were to engage in
physical activity. Television viewing, however,
was not related to measures of children’s obesity
(DuRant, Baranowski, Johnson & Thompson,
1994).

Computer use
• Four- and fi ve-year-old children were exposed to

computer software in their preschool classrooms
three times a week for seven months. Children
used either developmentally appropriate computer
software, developmentally appropriate software

with supplemental learning activities, or non-
developmentally appropriate computer software.
Children who used the developmentally appropriate
software had improved intelligence test scores,
non-verbal skills, dexterity, and long-term memory.
When supplemental activities were provided,
children also improved in verbal and conceptual
skills. Creativity was reduced among children who
used non-developmentally appropriate software
(Haugland, 1992).

The 2000s

The Funding
Support for research on electronic media effects
on children zero to six in the 2000s has been
characterized by more government grants than non-
government awards. To date, 27 grants have been
awarded to support this area of research. Fifteen of
those grants have been from government sources and
12 grants have been from non-government sources.
The primary government funder in the 2000s has
been the NIH, awarding 11 grants. Within NIH,
the National Institute for Child Health and Health
Development (NICHD) has awarded the most grants.
NSF and the US Department of Education have
been the other government funders. To date, NSF
has awarded three grants and the US Department
of Education has awarded one. Other NIH funders
include the National Institute on Deafness and Other
Communication Disorders (NIDCD), the National
Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), the National
Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) and the National
Institute for Mental Health (NIMH).

Non-government funders in the 2000s have been
distributed across non-profi t groups, foundations,
professional groups, the media industry and
universities. The most support has come from
non-profi ts including WGBH Boston, the Center
for Ecoliteracy, Sesame Workshop and the Public
Broadcasting Service (PBS). Foundation support has
come from the Fisher Price Foundation and the Kaiser
Family Foundation. Professional support has been
provided by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Support from the media industry was awarded by
Sirius Thinking Ltd. University support has been
given by Ohio State University and the University of
Pennsylvania. The funders of research of which the
funding date could not be identifi ed include NSF, the
Nesholm Family Foundation, the Bernard van Leer
Foundation, the University of Illinois and the American
Heart Association. In addition, four studies were
located in which no funding was provided.

The Research
Research on media effects on young children in
the 2000s has largely focused on demonstrating
learning from educational television programs. The
overwhelming majority of research studies continue to
focus on television, but a few studies have examined
children’s use of computers. Continuing the public
health focus on media effects, obesity has emerged as
a growing concern among researchers.

January 2005 Page 8The Effects of Electronic Media on Children
Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research

Specifi c Findings

Television and learning
• Children who regularly watched Blue’s Clues,

a curriculum-based interactive TV program for
preschoolers, scored higher on standardized
measures of problem solving and fl exible thinking
than children who did not watch Blue’s Clues,
even though both groups of children had scored
equivalently on a pre-test prior to Blue’s Clues
exposure (Anderson, Bryant, Wilder, Santomero,
Williams, et al., 2000).

• Educational TV viewing at two and three years
of age predicted school readiness among low to
moderate income children (Wright, Huston, Murphy,
St Peters, Pinon, et al, 2001).

• Viewing of educational programs like Dora the
Explorer, Blue’s Clues, Dragontales, Arthur, and
Clifford between six and 30 months of age was Clifford between six and 30 months of age was Clifford
associated with accelerated language growth,
whereas overall television viewing (including adult
programs) was associated with reduced vocabulary
(Linebarger & Walker, in press).

• Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth
indicated that TV viewing at age one and three
was associated with parental reports of attention
disorder symptoms at age seven. Attention disor-
der symptoms were indicated by parent response
to the fi ve-item hyperactivity subscale of the
Behavioral Problems Index (BPI), which assesses
concentration, impulsivity, and restlessness. For
every additional 2.9 hours of TV viewed per week
at age one, a child was 28% more likely to exhibit
attention disorder symptoms at age seven (Christa-
kis, Zimmerman, DiGiuseppe, & McCarty, 2004).

• Arguably the most signifi cant study published to
date in the 2000s is Anderson, Huston, Schmitt,
Linebarger, and Wright’s (2001) Early Childhood
Television Viewing and Adolescent Behavior. In the
early 1980s, Anderson and his colleagues installed
time-lapse video cameras in the homes of 106
Massachusetts families for a ten-day period and
recorded their television viewing and interactions
in front of the set. An additional 228 families in
Massachusetts and 326 families in Kansas (in
addition to the 106 families with video cameras
installed in their homes) completed TV viewing
diaries. Five hundred and seventy of the 660 initial
families were able to be recontacted by telephone
when the children were adolescents, and their high
school transcripts were obtained. Preschoolers
who viewed educational TV programs had higher
grades and read more books in high school. Among
girls, viewing violent programs in preschool was
associated with lower high school grades.

Health outcomes
• The likelihood of obesity among low-income

multi-ethnic preschoolers (aged one to fi ve
years) increased for each hour per day of TV or
video viewed. Children who had TV sets in their

bedrooms (40% of their sample) watched more TV
and were more likely to be obese (Dennison, Erb &
Jenkins, 2002).

• Children (average age of four years) preferred
specifi c foods advertised on video more than
children who had not seen the foods advertised on
video (Borzekowski & Robinson, 2001).

• Body fat and body mass index increased most
between the ages of four and 11 among children
who watched the most TV (Proctor, Moore, Gao,
Cupples, Bradlee, et al, 2003).

Infants’ responses to media
• One-year-olds avoided an object after they

watched an actress react negatively to it on
video, suggesting that infants can apply emotional
reactions seen on television to guide their own
behavior (Mumme & Fernald, 2003).

• Two-year-olds who watched themselves on TV via a
live video camera hookup for several minutes once
a day for two weeks were able to locate an object
hidden in a room after watching a live video of an
adult hiding the toy in the room (Troseth, 2003).
Previous studies had revealed that two-year-olds
(without such videocamera experience) could not
locate a hidden object based on information from
video (Troseth & DeLoache, 1998).

CONCLUSIONS

From birth to age six, children develop and change
rapidly. Because early experiences lay the groundwork
for later development, children are particularly
vulnerable during these years lack of good nutrition,
for instance, can dramatically affect a child later
growth, while positive early experiences can initiate a
positive trajectory that continues throughout children
lives.

Media are increasingly part of very young children
environments. Television programming is being made
especially for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers,
and national marketing campaigns are dedicated to
convincing parents that their children need media
products for infants such as aby videos and 
apware. On the positive side of the ledger, there
is evidence that thoughtfully designed television
used at the appropriate developmental stage can be
educational. At the same time, other research shows
that entertainment media can contribute to aggressive
behavior, anxiety, and obesity in young children. The
need to develop scientifi cally based, practical answers
to important questions about media effects on the
physical, mental, and social health of very young
children is now greater than ever.

Over the past 40 years, funding for research in
the area of media’s effects on young children has
not been a consistent priority. Despite limited
opportunities for funding, researchers committed
to investigating the effects of media on very young
children have been quite resourceful, in many cases

January 2005 Page 9The Effects of Electronic Media on Children
Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research

converting other grants to work on this research,
pursuing the work as part of projects focused on
other issues, or funding the research out of their own
pockets. Limited resources have been well spent and
much has been learned. However, what we know
about this area remains limited in scope compared
to what we might discover with adequate research
funding.

What We Have Learned

Early research demonstrated that children can
learn specifi c, novel behaviors from television. The
learning of aggression from media violence received
substantial attention in the 1960s and 1970s, but
has been less of a focus in recent decades. This is in
part because many leading media researchers believe
that the evidence that media violence contributes to
anxiety, desensitization, and increased aggression
has been compelling and virtually unanimous. Among
very young children, violent media have been shown
to elicit fear responses that are long lasting, linked to
PTSD symptoms, and can occur after one exposure.

Advertising and its effects on consumerism in children
have been a continuing concern of researchers since
the 1970s. Research has shown that very young
children are unable to recognize the persuasive intent
of advertising. Policies limiting or banning direct
advertising to children have been developed by groups
as diverse as the American Psychological Association
(APA) and the European Union. While there are ethical
concerns associated with advertising to children for
any product, parents and child health professionals
are particularly concerned about the proliferation of
child-targeted advertising for high sugar-, salt- and fat-
containing snack foods.

The positive infl uences of age-appropriate, curriculum-
based educational television on children’s cognitive
abilities and school readiness have been well-
documented. Basic scientifi c research on how
children attend to and comprehend television has
evolved into sophisticated studies of how children can
learn from electronic media. This, in turn, has led to
the design and production of a number of effective
educational television programs, starting with Sesame
Street, which many experts regard as one of the most
important educational innovations of recent decades.
Formative research and evaluation of educational
television has led to increasingly sophisticated
educational programming, such as Blue’s Clues and
Dora the Explorer. Longitudinal research has shown
that appropriate educational television teaches young
children the skills necessary for immediate and long
term school success.

Future Directions for Research

Despite the progress that has been made, there are
still several areas where further research is critical:

Advertising. Billions of research dollars are spent
by corporations to determine how to attract and
cultivate brand loyalty among children. Yet most

advertising research is proprietary, inaccessible to the
general public, and intended to encourage children
to buy products, regardless of how those products
might affect children’s overall health and well-being.
Additional research is necessary to determine if
exposure to such advertising during this vulnerable
and formative time in children’s lives is associated with
lifelong consequences. Preschoolers, toddlers, and
perhaps even infants can form “relationships” with
characters in television programs, videos, or interactive
media. These connections can be exploited through
new types of advertising including toy merchandising
and product tie-ins. New advertising techniques,
such as product placement or online games featuring
products for children, have also emerged along with
new media platforms. Research is necessary to
understand these dynamics and to protect very young
children and their parents from unfair manipulation.

Educational media. Further funding for formative
and evaluative research of educational media is
necessary to ensure that programs claiming to teach
young children are fulfi lling their potential. Much of the
research on educational television has been funded by
private institutions and media producers. Considering
the three-hour requirement of the Children’s Television
Act and the goals of the No Child Left Behind
initiative, the Federal government has much to gain
from ensuring the availability of quality, effective
educational television. Often, low quality programs are
claimed as fulfi lling the educational requirements of
broadcast affi liates. Ongoing research is necessary to
continue to produce and evaluate superior educational
television programming, and to determine the positive
and negative effects of early non-educational media
use on language development, acquisition of reading
skills, and school motivation.

Interactive media. Research is needed to
investigate the effects of new, interactive media that
are marketed for young children. Preschool children
and toddlers are increasingly targeted as consumers
of video games, computers, the Internet, and
electronic toys. These “new media” are on a growth
trajectory to surpass old media such as television
and movies in terms of exposure and infl uence.
New media are increasingly graphic, immersive, and
interactive. Such technological advances may offer
potential benefi ts, including better visual attention,
hand-eye coordination and child-controlled learning, as
well as possible dangers, such as ergonomic injuries,
more subtle exposure to marketing infl uences, and
the learning and rehearsing of unhealthy or dangerous
behaviors. Attention and comprehension research that
has been so effective in informing the development
of educational television needs to be expanded to
interactive media in order to advance the creation of
educational software, and research should evaluate
the effects of new media on children’s cognitive,
physical, and social development.

Infant media. As media are increasingly developed
for infants, research also must turn in that direction.
There has been a veritable explosion in media
products available for very young children, particularly

January 2005 Page 10The Effects of Electronic Media on Children
Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research

infants and toddlers. Sales of “baby videos” have
tripled over the past two years (Khermouch, 2004).
For decades, researchers thought children did not
begin systematically viewing television until two or two
and a half years of age. Now that content is created
specifi cally to attract and maintain infants’ attention,
research should address the widespread use of media
by infants and investigate the potential effects of such
use.

Background media. In addition to issues about
programming created specifi cally for children, the
impact of background media on children also deserves
attention. Recent research has shown that one-,
two-, and three-year-olds’ play and focused attention
episodes are signifi cantly shorter in length in the
presence of background television (Evans, 2003).
Parent child interactions are also signifi cantly less
frequent in the presence of background television
(Kerkorian, 2004). These results are intriguing, yet
further research is necessary to document the effects
of exposure to television in the home on very young
children’s development. Certainly this is an area ripe
for further exploration.

Long-term outcomes. Controlled experiments
exploring the long-term outcomes of media use
patterns in early childhood, including the following of
AAP or APA guidelines, are critical for this research
area. There has only been one study demonstrating
a link between early television viewing and attention
disorder. The National Children’s Study proposed by
the NICHD and the Environmental Protection Agency
represents a unique opportunity to better understand
the effects of media as a powerful and pervasive
environmental health infl uence and to locate potential
intervention points.

Media interventions. In order to mediate the
effects of media on young children, interventions such
as media literacy programs and parental education
curricula should be designed and evaluated. There
have been almost no media literacy programs
designed for zero- to six-year-olds. The United States
is far behind other countries in this regard; Australia
and the Netherlands begin teaching media literacy in
preschool and continue it through higher education.
Research in older children indicates that media literacy
may be the most effective intervention with which to
counter negative media effects.

Media infl uences on young children are not only
strong and pervasive, but also potentially controllable
– especially in the early years when parents determine
the majority of their children’s media exposure. In
order to ensure healthy media diets among children,
it is important to understand how parents make
decisions about their children’s media use, so that
effective interventions can be designed where
appropriate. Anticipatory guidance and child-healthy
advice about media use provided by pediatricians at
“well baby” visits can function as a “tipping point” to
encourage parents to think carefully about the media
their children consume.

While government funding for studies on media
effects has been limited, researchers have been
very productive, generating fi ndings that have
infl uenced public policy and led to the creation
of effective educational television programming.

But research has not come close to keeping
up with the pace of new media development.
Infants, toddlers and preschoolers today are
developing in an environment saturated with
media, and unanswered questions abound
concerning their use of electronic media. In
order to fully grasp the positive and negative
consequences of this media use, funding must
be available for a comprehensive, cohesive
research agenda on media effects.

Endnotes

1 As an example, using indexed terms to search the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Computer Retrieval of
Information on Scientifi c Projects (CRISP) database for
grants awarded by the government in 2004, “Preschool”
combined with “Mass Information Media” yielded two
results, while Preschool combined with other health and
development topics yielded many more results: Nutrition
(43), Reading Disorder (17), Diabetes (11).
2 The NIH Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientifi c
Projects (CRISP) database maintains award information
on grants from 1972 to the present. The NSF database
maintains award information for 1900 to the present. The
following terms were used to search both databases:
media, television, music, video, video games, movies,
motion pictures, fi lms, internet, computers, toddlers,
young children, infant human (zero to one year), child
(zero to eleven years), and preschool child (one-fi ve
years).
3 The primary funding data available to date include
funder name, award recipient, award date and description
of project for government supported work. The NIH,
the primary funder of work in this area, does not make
funding award amounts publicly available on its database.
For non-government work, funding dates were diffi cult to
obtain. Often, awards were received in one decade and
research using the funding was published one or two
decades later. Further, many non-government funders,
such as foundations and corporations, do not make
award information publicly available.
4 The other NIH funder was the National Institute of
Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK).

This Issue Brief was written for the Kaiser Family
Foundation by Marie Evans Schmidt, PhD, David
Bickham, PhD, Brandy King, MLIS, Ronald Slaby, PhD,
Amy C. Branner, MA, and Michael Rich, MD, MPH,
of The Center on Media and Child Health (CMCH),
Children’s Hospital Boston. CMCH (www.cmch.tv) is
an interdisciplinary collaborative between researchers
and clinicians dedicated to research, education and
intervention on media and children’s health. At the
Foundation, the project was directed by Victoria Rideout,
MA, vice president and director of the Program for the
Study of Entertainment Media and Health.

January 2005 Page 11The Effects of Electronic Media on Children
Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research

January 2005 Page 12The Effects of Electronic Media on Children
Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research

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January 2005 Page 16The Effects of Electronic Media on Children
Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research

the
whole child
development

guide

edition I

Dec. 2004

LEGO®

Author: Prof. Edith Ackermann, Contributors: Dr. Dorothy Singer (The Learning Relevance Grid and The Complete Discovery System) and Dr. Aaron Falbel.
www.lego.com/parents

141

Part 4.:

Early School Years
Ages 4 – 8 Years

The content is made available for individual use and shall not be reproduced or edited without permission from The LEGO Group.
The Whole Child Development Guide is grounded in recent research findings and has been developed by the LEGO Learning Institute in partnership with experts in the field.
Author: Prof. Edith Ackermann, Contributors: Dr. Dorothy Singer (The Learning Relevance Grid and The Complete Discovery System) and Dr. Aaron Falbel.
www.lego.com/parents

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Part 4.:

Overview of Early School Years

Ages 4-8 Years
Me – Being Me

ME – USING MY BODY
Whereas the child’s physical-motor development during early childhood
is marked by large growth spurts, during the early school years it is rather
gradual and constant. This being said, between the ages of four and eight, a
child’s improvement in coordination and skill is still amazing. So is the child’s
perceptuo-motor integration, or ability to synchronize her body movements
to the movements she sees, or hears, others performing, (so-called eye-hand
coordination is a part of perceptuo-motor integration, and begins when
children eyes can be guided to follow movements of their hands).

The period between ages 4 and 8 is a time of expanded vigour and energy. It
is also a time when the child learns to master her otherwise wild exuberance,
and put it at the service of things he likes to do.

As they enter their fi fth’s year, most children have enough mastery over their
gross motor skills to be able to balance, hop, skip, run, and jump. And they
have perfected the use of fi ne motor skills well enough to be able to reach,
grasp, and manipulate objects. A four-year-old can eat and dress by herself.
She combs her hair, washes her hands and brushes her teeth. She opens
closets and drawers, and manipulates remote controls. She scribbles, cuts,
and glues. In sum, four-year-olds have a fairly good dynamic balance when
running and climbing, as well as a static balance, which allows them to
stand on one foot. They have learned to project themselves accurately when
jumping and hopping, or throwing and catching

During the early school years, between the ages of 4 and 8, the child perfects
both his agility and dexterity to gain a solid grip and better control over his
body movements in space and time, and above all, in relation to others.
By the time they reach their eighth birthday, most children readily engage
in activities such as sawing, sewing, painting, or knitting. Seven-year-olds
can use adult tools, such as hammers, saws, rakes, and shovels. They now

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manoeuvre a two-wheeled bike, and they are ready to skate, ski, or swim.
They engage in many group activities, from soccer to gymnastics, from
hockey to ballet, and they have become competent team players.

In the later section, we shall look at how children, between the ages of 4 and
8, progressively refi ne their physical-motor abilities, which, in turn, opens
the way to many new activities, fosters a growing sense of freedom and
control, and new forms of relating to the world, self, and others.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The main sources for Me in this Part are:
Anselmo, S, Franz, W. (1995). Early Childhood Development: Prenatal
Through Age Eight. (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall [First
edition was published in 1985. New York: Merill / Macmillan]. Sanford, A.R.
and Zelman, J.G. (1981) Learning accomplishment profi le. Winston Salem,
NC: Kaplan.

ME – KNOWING MYSELF
The roots of a child’s a self-concept lies in infancy, and evolves through the
many interactions the child has with her social environment. By their fourth
birthday, most children have acquired a fairly good sense of themselves
as distinct from others. They also have a budding sense of identity or self-
invariance: the idea that some core aspects of self remain unchanged over
time.

One of the big breakthroughs, as children enter their preschool years, is the
passage from a merely physical- and action-centric self-concept to a more
psychological one. In other words, children develop a sense of self-worth,
or self-esteem: the emotional, affective, moral, and intellectual facets of a
child’s early self-concept. This, in turn, requires an understanding that the self
is unique (distinct from other), stable (identity over time), and worth one’s
own, and other people’s, consideration, and love. Self-esteem or self-worth
emerges as the child learns to distinguish between an inner-me, or “agent,”
that drives her actions, and an outer-me: a person’s physical attributes and
/or actions.

By developing a positive and accurate body image/self-concept, children
build a reliable frame of reference—themselves—to help them act and move
in space, as well as among other people. Body image, like self-awareness,
provides an internal compass to help children orient and situate themselves
in relation to others.

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Awareness of self-defi ning bodily functions includes sexual and gender
awareness, as well as a sense of what’s inside the body, and what it means to
be sick or in good health, sad or happy. Awareness of self, as a worthwhile,
competent, and good person, includes both moral judgements and meta-
cognitive skills, i.e. an increasing ability to gauge one’s own mental abilities,
both cognitively and affectively.

In this Part, we shall look at how 4–8-year-old children’s sexual and gender
awareness, sense of self-worth, and views of their own competences, or
meta-cognitive skills, evolve during early school years.

Again, each child grows at his own pace, so that development stages and ages
are no more than indicative of general trends. What’s more, self-development
is not a neutral area! Children live with people who hold their own views on
what a good person, or a true self, should be. This makes for great variability in
ideals, which in turn informs how adults support and constrain their children.

Us – Growing Together

US – RELATING TO OTHERS
Early school years mark huge progress in a child’s abilities to understand,
communicate, and refl ect upon matters that govern and motivate social
relations. Children gain greater control over their emotions, an increased
self-awareness, and they learn to put their feelings, intentions, desires,
and beliefs at work to consolidate their social ties, while preserving their
identity.

Between the ages of 4-8, a child’s ways of relating expand and become
more fl exible. They change according to whom the child deals with,
when the interaction takes place, and under which circumstances. So, for
example, a 5-year-old may want to boss around a younger sibling, whine
with Grandma, and argue with her teacher. Yet, as she becomes aware that
moods can change over time, and that ambiences come with their particular
sets of constraints and permissions, she may choose to give a hug to her little
brother, cajole Grandma, and tease the teacher. By the end of this period,
around age 8, most children have become competent and reliable partners,
and collaborators. They have learned to master some of the trade-offs that
growing in connection involve. More important, they have learned that even
failed attempts at relating can be repaired, or compensated for: one could
call this “conservation of relations.”

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A person’s emotions play a key role in how he relates to others. Emotions
are like internal signals that prepare a person to cope with situations that, to
him, are associated with fear, joy, or sadness. The problem with emotions,
however, is that they take over, at least initially, forcing us to act in certain
ways. Progressively however, the child learns to recognize and describe his
own (and other people’s) emotions and starts to understand the behavioural
consequences of certain emotional states. That’s when his initial urge to
act out whatever he feels turns into a more mediated and fl exible palette of
possible responses that the child then taps into as a means to relate better
with others. In other words, as the child becomes aware of his feelings and
intentions (and those of others), he increases his ability to negotiate and co-
operate. He monitors and communicates what he feels, intends, desires, and
believes, to regulate his exchanges and dealings with others.

According to Erikson, a fi rst developmental breakthrough occurs during the “play
age”: from about 3 1⁄2 to age 5. During it, the growing child learns: (1) to imagine
and to broaden her skills through active play of all sorts, including fantasy (2) to
co-operate with others (3) to lead as well as to follow. That’s when the child enters
a new phase of psycho-social development called initiative. Initiative adds to
autonomy a quality of following through on tasks for the sake of “getting to know
more.” While bringing about obvious benefi ts, initiative also comes with its share
of new challenges. Following through on things can be risky and solitary. It is
thus not by chance that initiative coincides with the emergence of the “play age.”
Pretend and role play, both of which peak at this stage, offer safe ground to explore
some of the consequences that taking initiative entail. In other words, when the
child is ready, developmentally speaking, to take the risks of initiative, she fi rst
wants to explore those risks through joint make-believe activities.

Later during the school years, 6- to 8-year-old children become ready to
embark on yet another of Erikson’s stages of psycho-social development:
They become industrious, which has a decisive effect on school life and
on the later entrance into the world of work. Without industry, according to
Erikson, children may suffer from a sentiment of inferiority. Children at this
age become excited by projects such as building forts, sewing, and cooking,
and…the harder the better!

Let’s now look at how children, between the ages of 3 1/2 and 5, deal
with the trade-offs that building initiative entail e.g., how do they face the
risks of taking initiative while maintaining the benefi ts of being connected
through consensual agreement? And as they become more involved in
various endeavours and interests, let’s see how 6- to 8-year-olds become

147

industrious, how they keep their creative spark and playful spontaneity while
following through on their self-set tasks in order to succeed.

The Feeling Peeling Game. To help children become aware of their feelings
and, by the same token, understand how others feel, Smith’s “feeling
peeling” game (fi ve years up) remain a good inspiration. Again, the game
can be played in dyads, or in groups (Smith 1982). As in the previous stage,
the idea is to ask questions that encourage children to think about the causes
and consequences of various emotions. Emotions to be “peeled” at this age
include: happy, angry, affection, afraid, and sad, and also embarrassed,
ashamed, guilty. Questions that can be asked include:

– What would you do when you are X? [e.g. afraid].
– What would you like to do when you are X…..
– What would you like other people to do for you when you are X….
– What are some of the things that give you an afraid feeling?
– How do you feel when someone is afraid of you?
– What feeling is diffi cult to tell other people about?

Note. This list is only a beginning of a large series of questions that may
encourage children to explore their emotions and understand those of
others. Imagine role-play scenarios in which can enact and play out some of
the questions, taking on different roles. Put the same child in the role of the
agent and the recipient.

In role playing games, always respect a child’s desire not to disclose how
she or he feels, and make sure the children understand that there is nothing
wrong with having “negative” feelings, or even wanting to act them out.
Help them understand, beyond fi rst impressions or reactions, some of the
benefi ts of using one’s mind and heart to control initial drives.

US – UNDERSTANDING OTHERS
Early on, children tune into other people’s intentions, attitudes, and emotions,
and as they grow older, they become increasingly aware of how they and
others feel, act and think. They learn to understand and empathise with
others, and to look at the world, including themselves, through their eyes.
They learn to express, and refl ect on different people’s inner feelings and
mental states. In other words, children build their own theories of other
people’s, and creatures’, minds: from what they feel and think to what
they are capable of and driven by. (Astington, J., Harris, P., and Olson, D.,
1988).

148

A child’s journey toward getting to know others, to understand what they
want, feel, believe, and intend, is a lengthy one, which involves a two-fold
ability: 1. to “de-centre,” or move away from oneself, and 2. to “re-centre,”
or take on another’s view. The focus here is on how children, between the
ages of 4 to 8, operate this shift away from themselves to build a sense of
other (Schantz, 1975). It is worth noting that the apparently contradictory
movements of getting to know oneself and moving away from self, toward
other, are intricately related. Without self-control and self-awareness there
can be no respect and understanding of others. Both competencies emerge
and evolve together.

Early school years are marked by a growing ability to understand not just
that other people may think and feel differently, but what it is they may
feel and think! During these years, children become able to empathize and
adopt different perspectives. They learn to negotiate, and make sense of,
other people’s expectations and intentions. The seventh year also marks the
beginnings of Piaget’s stage of concrete operations. The child is now able to
think about events that were previously performed through physical actions,
and mentally reverse the direction of action and thought. She also understands
that thoughts are different from actions, and appearances different from reality.
A child’s ability to put herself in other people’s shoes or to feel what they feel,
has deep repercussions in how she relates to, and understands, others.

World – Making Sense of it All

WORLD – EXPLORING AND INVESTIGATING
Early school years are marked by a child’s expanding curiosity and mindful
investigation. During this period, the child’s physical energy and intellectual
vigour are at a peak and his natural exuberance is being channelled in the
pursuit of many exciting, long lasting, and challenging projects. From a
wonderer, one may say, the child becomes an explorer and experimenter.
This, in turn, allows for many new wonders to pop-up, and be further
explored. In this process, the child learns a great deal about himself and
about the world in which she lives and grows.

Children between the ages of 4 and 8 face a multitude of new experiences
outside the confi nes of their homes. Provided the passage happens felicitously,
the child’s curiosity and eagerness to learn develops even further. Not surprisingly,
this is also a time when children like to take charge. They become true experts at
fi guring things for themselves, and they excel at learning-by-doing.

149

Needless to say, there are differences between the manners of inquiry
and worldviews of a four and an eight-year-old. Typically, four-year-olds
base their judgements on direct action and perception. They proceed by
intelligent trial and error, often focusing on one variable at a time when trying
to get a handle on a complex situation. A four-year-old’s worldview remains
essentially “egocentric,” and their thinking is magical and animistic. Eight-
year-olds, in contrast, engage in directed and systematic experimentation,
and are able to compose with multiple variables when making decisions.
Eight-year-olds’ thinking is reversible (i.e., they can mentally reverse the
direction of thought, and action), which, in turn, impacts the ways they
conceive of such categories as time, space, and causation. Their take on
things has become more “objective,” less egocentric.

The seventh year marks the big breakthrough with the beginnings of Piaget’s
stage of concrete operations. The child now anticipates events that were
previously acted out, and draws conclusions in her head. Besides reversibility,
a benchmark of concrete operations is conservation: the understanding that
objects or quantities remain the same—or invariant—despite a change in
their physical appearance.

In the later section, we shall look at how children between the ages of 4
and 8 examine, understand, and refl ect upon their actions, thus becoming
increasingly good investigators and experimenters. Let us also look at how
their worldviews evolve as they relentlessly try to fi gure out how things work
through their hands-on exploration. More specifi cally, we shall look at
children’s notion of time, causation, and space, as well as their abilities to
conserve substance and quantities.

WORLD – SEEKING LOGIC
At fi rst, a child’s logic is a logic-in-action, and the fi rst categories that
children establish are based on how objects, including people, resist or yield
to their explorations. This section addresses how a child’s logical thinking,
or “logico-mathematical” capabilities, evolves during his early school years.
In other words, how does a 4- to 8-year-old child use what he has learned
“in action” to bring some order and coherence into a world too bewildering
and complex to be grasped? What forms of reasoning does he privilege at
different ages?

As in the previous section, there are striking differences between the forms
of reasoning, or logic, of most four-year-olds and those of most eight-year-
olds. Typically, a four-year-old’s thinking is pre-operational (Piaget 1960a,

150

1960b, 1964), whereas eight-year-olds have acquired the ability to reason
“logically.” They have reached the stage of what Piaget refers to as concrete
operations (Piaget 1960a, 1960b, 1964). One of the characteristics of
concrete operations, most relevant in this section, is reversibility: the ability
to mentally reverse the direction of thought and action. So, for example, a
6-year-old will fi nd it obvious (a “logical necessity,” in Piaget’s words) that
if a number can be added to another it can also be subtracted, or that if an
object moves from point A to B to C, then it should be able to return from
C to B to A.

As the child begins to reason in ways that are reversible a whole structure
of interrelated logico-mathematical capabilities, or operations, appears: The
child now understands such relations as transitivity, inclusion, and identity,
and she uses her newly acquired logico-mathematical power to infer many
otherwise invisible patterns and rules, and to make logical deductions.

The transition from pre-operational thinking to concrete operational thinking
occurs between the ages of six and seven, and is usually completed by the
time the child is eight years old.

In the later section, we shall look into the lengthy journey that brings a
child from pre-logical to logical thinking. We shall focus on how 4–8-year-
olds come to understand basic mathematical ideas, such as quantifi cation,
elementary number theory, and their handling of logical operations, such as
classifi cations and seriatims.

To explain the development of logic in the early school years, we refer
mainly to Piaget, whose ideas about children’s thinking during early school
years have revolutionized the fi eld of psychology and education. To this
day, Piaget’s contribution to how children think is unique and unsurpassed
(Piaget 1960a, 1960b, 1964, Piaget and Inhelder, 1969).

Creations – Realising Visions

CREATIONS – IMAGINING
More than logic itself, imagination is one of the highest mental achievements
of homo sapiens. It allows the emergence of new ideas and fosters innovation.
To imagine something new requires that one grab a hold of what could be
instead of merely representing what is. It requires that one picture what’s
not.

151

Not surprisingly, then, it takes the emergence of what psychologists call “the
symbolic function,” around the age of 2 for children to be able to imagine
alternatives in their heads. Only then, coinciding with the emergence of
speech and thinking, will children start to evoke and revisit past experiences
or events and, more to the point, add a new twist or change the ending
in some way. Imagination proper sets in when, beyond merely creating
variations in the absence of a model, the child starts to produce fi ctional
scenes and invents scenarios that don’t exist.

Early manifestations of human imagination can be seen in a child’s fantasy
or pretend play, as well as in her willingness to invent and converse with
imaginary companions. They appear in her budding sense of humour and
abilities to tease and joke. Humour can be thought of as a subset of make-
believe and play (McGhee, 1984): an intellectual play with ideas or words,
based upon appreciation of logical displacements and incongruities. What
characterizes all of the above activities is suspension of disbelief rather than
a quest for truth

At the beginning of early school years (between the ages of 4 and 6), a child’s
imagination tends to run wild, while, at the same time, becoming ever more
sophisticated as she perfects her abilities to incorporate other people in his
pretend play, sharpens his sense of humour, and cultivates his ways of teasing.
Towards the end of the period (between the ages of 6 and 8), the child’s
imagination adapts itself to fi t the purpose of specifi c endeavours. Many
factors contribute to this “domestication” of early childhood imagination,
not the least of which is children’s own desire, as they grow older, to put
their wildest thoughts at the service of realisable undertakings. School too
often contributes to the trimming of imagination if children’s creative impulse
is downplayed to the benefi t of her rational mind.

As they reach their eighth birthday, most children now use fi ction, pretence,
and jokes to acquaint themselves with otherwise hidden thoughts, and to
release emotional tensions without hurting the feelings of others. The child’s
imagination is now more directed and ruled: Her abilities to fantasize and
pretend become more “civilized,” her mental exuberance contained, and
her abilities to play with words and incongruities less idiosyncratic. This
being said, her capacity to imagine will prevail throughout adult life.

In the next section, we shall look into the development of a 4- to 8-year-old
child’s creative thinking through the lens of her pretend play as well as her ability
to produce and appreciate jokes, word puns, and other poetic ”incongruities.”

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The main sources for Creations in this Part are:
Anselmo, S, Franz, W. (1995). Early Childhood Development: Prenatal
Through Age Eight. (2nd Ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall [First
edition was published in 1985. New York: Merill/Macmillan].
McGhee, P. (1979) Humor: its origin and development. San Francisco:
Freeman & Company.

CREATIONS – ENACTING AND CREATING
Children not only make up things in their heads, or fantasize; they also make
things, or give form, or expression, to their inner most feelings and ideas. In
other words, children bring to life their fantasies to make their dreams come
true! Children speak their minds in many ways, and they use a variety of
media: children speak in gestures and in voice, in pictures and in words,
picking whichever medium conveys their ideas the best. Children also
combine several media within a single production.

Through their personal and collective creations, children, like artists, bring
imagination into being…and they do so by design! Unlike scientists, a
child’s creative expression is less about building models and representations
of existing realities, so-called objective truths, than it is about exploring
possibilities, often possibilities within i.e., re-digesting or reverberating
deeply felt human experience. While both the artist and the scientist seek to
capture deep hidden truths, the fi rst uses language to inspire and evoke, and
the second to analyze and validate. In other words, creative expression is
the visible face of imagination at work!

This section speaks to the importance of creative expression as a source of
a child’s personal and intellectual growth. Of particular interest here is the
exciting and lengthy path that brings early school-age children to becoming
literate in the sense of becoming acquainted with, and fl uent in, the usage
of available cultural tools as means of self-expression. We purposely defi ne
literacy in the broadest possible sense to mean the ability to make and derive
meaning in any symbolic, expressive, or artistic medium.

Children are born into a world of signs, symbols and human-made artefacts.
Before long they appropriate these tools and they start making their own
original contributions. From speech to writing, from drawing to playing the
fl ute, from taking a picture to building a sand castle, children learn to say it,
to freeze it, and to refi ne and edit their expressions. They do so across media
and within the constraints proper to each medium. Most important, children

153

know how to use the progress they make in one language as a lever to enrich
their expressiveness in other languages or media.

As they reach their fourth birthday, children usually speak, gesture, and they
learn to draw and write. At this age, children also start to “read,” i.e. make
sense of other people’s traces and scribbles. Again, as soon as they talk, they
become interested in writing and reading. As they sing and listen to music,
they like to record rhythms and sounds, and to “draw” the noises and rhythms
they hear on a sheet of paper. Later in their lives, our creative youngsters
will continue express themselves creatively through drama, poetry, painting,
literature, design, and music, to name just a few possibilities.

Let us look at how early school-age children learn to express themselves
creatively, using “a hundred languages” (Malaguzzi, 1987), and how they
become literate in the broad sense defi ned above. The ages below are
indicative of general developmental trends. Especially when it comes to
literacy, the ages at which children are expected to master the conventions
of written language vary a great deal, not only among individuals but among
different countries or cultures as well.

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Part 4.:

Early School Years by Age Year

4-5 Years
Me – Being Me

ME – USING MY BODY
Kick the Ball & Keep the Beat! Four- to fi ve-year-olds are vigorous and energetic:
They love to play and, when given a chance, they become exuberant and “go
wild.” At the same time, children of this age also spend hours channelling their
energy—i.e., perfecting their physical-motoric abilities—by getting a better
handle on all kinds of objects, such as balls, bikes, swings, or seesaws. Like
their younger counterparts, 4–5-year-olds still spend hours on the playground,
using swings, slides, and climbing-structures. Yet, unlike younger children,
they have become amazingly skilled and autonomous users.

Four- to fi ve-year-olds like to keep in the fl ow (and in the beat) of things,
through dance and rhythm, and they learn to synchronize their body
movements and positions with that of others, using visual clues. They
march at a drumbeat, and play musical chairs, or “statues” (a person takes
a position, and other imitate). When playing ball, they work hard at refi ning
their kicking and catching techniques, and they become truly expert tricycle
riders.

As mentioned before, activities like kicking a ball or riding a bike are not just
a matter of gross-motor skills. They also involve a great deal of dexterity, a
strong, secure grip, a focused attention, and body awareness, as well as a
good sense of rhythm and balance.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 4-5 year-old naturally strive to learn?

The main areas of change, between the ages of 4 and 5 are an improved sense
of balance (both static and dynamic), as well as an increased perceptual-motor
integration i.e. being able to produce or imitate a gesture one sees someone
else doing (sometimes referred to as eye-hand coordination), a greater body
awareness (i.e. body concept, laterality or right-left discrimination, and

156

directionality), and temporal-perceptual awareness, or sense of time and
rhythm.

All these areas come into play as the child exercises, and refi ne his skills.
All contribute to optimize the performances. As an example, when playing
ball, 4-5 years become quite adept at throwing and catching, and when
throwing, they turn the non-dominant shoulder toward the target and steps
with opposition as they throw. They catch the ball away from the body, in
the hands with palms facing each other (Anselmo and Franz, 1995. p. 384).
And when playing inside the house, 4–5-year-olds like to scribble, draw, cut,
and glue. They still use broad movements with their fi ngers, arms, and hands.
Yet, they produce recognizable shapes in their drawings, which they love to
present as gifts to family members.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Four- to fi ve-year-olds can walk heel-to-toe for four or more steps along a
line and stand on one foot for fi ve seconds. On the playground, they can get
themselves started on swings, walk on a beam, climb ladders and slide down
slides, without assistance. And since moms and dads are less needed on the
playground, they spend more time playing with other children.

At this age, children also become eager and skilled tricycle riders. Their hopping,
jumping, and kicking skills improve. Walking downstairs is now mastered,
without the help of an adult. Four- to fi ve-year-olds eat much more neatly than
3-year-olds. They start using a fork, spoon, and, if allowed, a knife. They can
carry a cup fi lled with water from the kitchen sink to the table, without spilling.
As they approach their 5th birthday, most children are able to dress themselves.
They put on their socks, and open and close buttons and zippers.

In kindergarten, 4–5-year-olds like to engage in all kinds of arts-and-crafts
activities: They cut and fold paper; glue pieces together, hammer pegs into
holes, draw and scribble, and assemble puzzles. They also like to bake,
to make clay fi gures, and to build sand castles. All these activities greatly
facilitate a child’s eye-hand coordination.

Four year-old children learn about the left and right sides of their bodies
(laterality), and about the body’s position and heading (directionality and
orientation). Yet, many children of this age still have diffi culties with tasks
that require left-right discriminations.

157

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

Let your kid play, and play with her. Play ball: You can now use smaller light
soccer-sized balls. Draw and paint: Finger paints are great at this age. Dance
with her. She loves to march in a parade. Play music, she enjoy beats and
rhythms. Go for walks, to the pool, to the playground. Indoors, let your child
play with age-appropriate puzzles, and offer her a big box of blocks with
which to build models and castles.

If you are an educator, don’t drill! Movement, balance, and rhythm can be explored
through play. Invite children to discover for themselves the ways they want to
move and stretch, and how far they want to “push” themselves. Remember: “our
bodies move in space, in time, with force, and with fl ow (…) There is never a
wrong move, but certain moves feel better” (Gilliom, 1970. p. 6).

Educators may imagine activities to broaden the palette of movements
made available to the children (Gilliom, 1970. p. 6). Gilliom proposes four
dimensions to be considered by parents and educators.

1. Where to move (space), which involves an understanding of self-space.
2. What to move (body awareness), which requires awareness of body parts

and relations between body / objects to be manoeuvred / space.
3. How to move? (force, balance). Involves creating / absorbing force (gravity),

transferring force (rocking, rolling, sliding) and transferring weight (step on
beams).

4. How to move in a smoother way (time, fl ow). Involves changing rhythm,
speed, pulse, and beat, and feel what it does.

For each dimension, many fun activities can be imagined (for inspiration,
see movement chart in Gilliom, 1970. p.8., and Anselmo and Franz, 1995.
p. 388). In all these activities, care-givers assume a role as play partners. If
done in a joyful way, this will lay the foundation for a child’s positive self-
concept and pleasant feelings toward such activities.

ME – KNOWING MYSELF
Introspective Fours: Building an Inner Sense of Self. The fi fth year marks a
new phase in a child’s growing sense of self. Three main areas of progress
include: a budding sense of self-esteem, or self-worth; an early form of
meta-cognitive awareness, or self-knowledge; and the ability to distinguish
between mind and body, when speaking about self and others.

158

Four year-olds develop an early sense of self beyond mere physical attributes,
observable acts, and concrete events. In other words, they overcome earlier
forms of “trivial behaviourism” by disentangling some of the intricacies
between what a person does, shows, or says in terms of her behaviour or
appearance, and what she thinks, feels, or intends. This, not surprisingly, leads
to new forms self-evaluation and self-knowledge, as well as new forms of moral
“judgements”. While paying closer attention to the “hidden” aspects of self,
4-5 years old children still have problems with egocentrism, and they do not
always recognize that a person’s inner states, thoughts, intentions or feelings,
can or should be different from their outer expression (Selman, 1980).

Four- to fi ve-year-old children’s body awareness and self-concept are partly
expressed in, and informed by, their understanding of sexuality, gender, as
well as by their views of what’s inside their body, and what makes a person
ill or well, sad or happy, and bad or good.

As they reach their 5th birthday, most children have developed a fairly
accurate sense of who they are and what they think they are able (or unable)
to do. This type of self-knowledge includes what are commonly called meta-
cognitive skills — an important component of more advanced refl ection,
learning, and introspection.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 4-5-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Like the “curious threes”, 4-5-year-old children still wonder: ‘Who am I?
Where do I come from? Where do I go?’ They also still puzzle over how babies
are made, what’s in their bodies, why people die, and what will become of
them after death. Yet, as they try to make sense of these questions, 4-5-year-
olds develop their own views and attitudes about their origins, well-being or
health, and their strengths and weaknesses as persons, and as learners.

Most signifi cant at this age, a person’s self begins to be seen as a mix of
action and intents, involving both body and mind. So, for example, 4-5-year-
old children not only understand themselves as being a boy or a girl, tall or
short, or blond or brown, but they begin to develop a sense who they are, as
persons, beyond being gendered, sized, or coloured.

A 4-5-year-old’s grasp of what happens inside her body and what it means to
be healthy or sick are still rather mechanical and animistic. So for example,
children can tell you where their brain, heart or stomach are located, yet

159

each organ still has a single function, and the inter-relations between them
remain unclear. A nice example by Selman shows that, at this age, children
“often report that their mouths tell their hand what to do or that their ideas
come from their tongues” (Selman, 1980. p.176).

When sick, 4–5-year-olds tend to blame either outside events (external
causes), or themselves, i.e. their bad behaviour (immanent justice). Their
views of how they came to be remain animistic or mechanical: either babies
are made, like dolls on an assembly line, or, if told that babies grow in mom’s
belly, 4-5-year-olds will assign human-like qualities to the sperm/or egg
(Bernstein and Cowan, 1981). They will imagine all those tiny little people
inside mom’s belly, helping to make the baby and bring it out.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain these competencies?

Four- to fi ve-year old children’s awareness of self transcends physical
appearances (pretty, small, girl, boy) to include “mindsets” (witty, nice, girly,
boyish), and the child starts to distinguish between feelings and actions.
He understands that while certain emotional reactions may be unwanted
and hard to control, our actions in reaction to inner emotions can, and
maybe should, be controlled. He doesn’t always understand why controlling
impulses may be a good thing beyond “Mom won’t like it” or “it could make
things worse”. But, that’s a start!

Four-year-olds’ conceptions of sickness, contagion, and causes of death are
still “magico- phenomenist”, to use Piaget’s term. While many four-year-olds
understand that sickness occurs through contagion, and contagion through
proximity, proximity itself remains this magical thing…some mystical, bad
infl uence.

Four- to fi ve-year-olds begin to develop a sense of fair play and are aware
of rules, although at this age, they may change them. They like board games
where there are rules. They like to be challenged, but at this age, they do not
always handle competition well.

SUPPORT:
What can caregivers do to support this natural development?

Help your child distinguish between feelings and actions, as well as between
actions and consequences. If your child is angry, or wants to hit her little

160

brother, encourage her to tell what’s wrong. Help her work out unspeakable
feelings through play. Soon enough, she will understand that getting upset
and acting impulsively can be separated and that sometimes it is worth
doing so.

Help your child accept his physical characteristics as well as his similarities
to, and differences from, others. In this regard, games like “me and my
shadow” and “body drawings” are still relevant at this age (projection of kids’
shadows against a wall, and asking kids to draw contours of their bodies on
big sheets of paper). Yet, at this age, expand the game by telling stories about
different people’s ways of being, or better, have the children tell their stories,
as a way to focus on psychological diversity, and moral issues.

While acknowledging diversity in ways of being, and of relating, avoid
gender or racial stereotyping. Help your child understand that people come
in many shades and shapes, that diversity is rich, and that good and bad are
colour blind.

A four-year-old’s sex education comes in response to questions about
how babies are born, and where she was before she was born. While
straightforward answers are welcome, there is no need to go into any more
anatomical details than the child asks for.

Us – Growing Together

US – RELATING TO OTHERS
Play and Initiative – Learning to do… and let do! According to Erikson, as soon
as basic trust is established, a child becomes ready and eager to discover the
thrills and threats of autonomy. And as autonomy sets in, most 3–4-year-
olds become very energetic, curious, and eager to participate in virtually any
activity. This is when pre-schoolers start to ask a hundred questions. This is
also when they embark on Erikson’s next socio-psychological stage, which
he referred to as building initiative.

Erikson’s theory of psycho-social development states that, starting at age 3 1/2
and up to age 5, children are faced with a new challenge. In his words, they
learn to take initiative, or they will suffer the effects of guilt! As mentioned
before, initiative adds to autonomy a quality of taking on tasks for the mere
pleasure of “following through on things” and “seeing where it takes us” that,
in Erikson’s eyes, needs to be nurtured.

161

Children’s sense of initiative is validated when adults respect and encourage
their interests, and when they genuinely respond to, and encourage, the
child to pursue their frequent questions, and try things out for themselves.
If initiative is not encouraged, children may ultimately lose their willingness
and ability to do what it takes to realise their own dreams. They shy off from
the healthy quest for achievement, or realisation, in future endeavours.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 4-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Four-year-olds are vigorous, imaginative, and playful. They are eager to learn,
play, and work with others. They listen to their teachers, and they participate
in conversations. They are curious and easily engaged in the excitements of
new undertakings. Their initiative extends to include social relations with
adults outside the family and with other children.

Four-year-olds have become pretty good at controlling their emotions, and
are increasingly aware of basic human feelings, such as sadness and anger.
They can recognize and describe feelings associated with liking, surprise,
disgust, boredom, loneliness, and curiosity. Children, at this age, also start
to understand the connections between emotions and social behaviour, and
inner thoughts, feelings or intents, their expression, and consequences on
others.

Four-year-olds like to engage in pretend play with peers. They participate
in group play, and they form privileged relations with individual friends.
They become better at sharing, at losing in competitive situations, and at
negotiating interactions with others. They show less frustration around play
equipment and toys, and they are more patient when they have to wait their
turn. This being said, the lengthy path that leads a child to gracefully manage
her emotions and feelings in social transactions is only starts at this age.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain these competencies?

Four-year-olds are usually very sociable, both in play situations and in
everyday activities: They like to please and are friendly to adults and peers.
They begin to show empathy, and talk about their feelings. Four-year-olds
participate in conversations and care to be listened to. They like to be taken
seriously. They become better at negotiating peer-confl icts and can follow
simple rules.

162

Four-year-olds have a wide range of “ways of being” at their disposal, which
they use according to circumstances: They cajole and cuddle, but they also
tease and persuade. In their play, they negotiate ever more complicated
plots, and they cooperate and help each other. This being said, they may
still boss around younger siblings, or try to get their way through whining
and screaming.

Many children of this age begin to enjoy “follow the leader” games. They
play catch with each other, and some start collecting items and sharing those
items, or swapping them. They begin to play board games, in which they
learn to take turns and cooperate.

SUPPORT:
What can caregivers do to support this natural development?

Four-year-olds are full of life. Yet, unbridled energy and exuberance can
sometime result in negative feelings, destructive acts, and manipulation.
That’s when adults can come in handy to help them channel their surplus of
energy in positive ways. And the best ways to help is to do so non-intrusively.
So if your 4-year-old withdraws, fears something that can’t possibly harm
him, or goes overboard and starts harming others, make sure you guide him
in ways that do not squash his initiative but rather channel it in more positive
ways. Don’t just say “No.” Say, “If you wish to do that, here is a way you
can do it safely or non-destructively.”

For example, if your child climbs on the dinner table, which genuinely annoys
you, don’t hesitate to tell her, “This place is for eating, not for climbing.”
Offer her alternatives: “You can either sit here and draw or have a snack, or
you go climb outside in the yard.” You can also give your child time for a
graceful closure: “You may climb down from the table yourself. Take your
time. But no climbing up again, after that!”

Four-year-olds like to be taken seriously. Create scenarios around cooking,
or fi xing things, where the child can play with these objects and pretend to
be the competent person who saves the day! Children love to be helpful,
and if they can’t always participate and help out in real activities, fantasy
activities may be almost as thrilling and fulfi lling.

Object-mediated turn-taking games, such as playing ball, as well as symbolic
(or fantasy) turn taking, such as role-play, “follow the leader” games (in
which the roles get switched) are much appreciated at this age. Through

163

playing ball, children learn the benefi ts of sharing, and taking turns. Through
role and pretend play, children explore how it feels to be another character,
and learn how to negotiate rules to play “fair” in many intriguing social
scenarios.

US – UNDERSTANDING OTHERS
Putting on Different Hats. In their fi fth year, children begin to understand that
other people may feel and think differently than they do, and they become
able, at least in concrete situations, such as joint pretend and role play, to
shift position, in their mind, between their own and other people’s views, or
perspectives. “The ability to imagine being another person with intentions
and feelings that are different from one’s own is surely important evidence
for children’s growing understanding of others—evidence that parallels the
signs of children’s abilities to deceive” (Dunn, 1991, p. 105).

At this age, children “do not (just) understand an emotional state, such
as sadness or shame, simply by focussing on the way that the emotion is
expressed, nor by noting the diverse situations that provoke an emotions.
Rather, they identify the mental perspective that someone adopts with
respect to those various situations (Harris, 1989. p 81). The child interprets
another person’s ways of being as a coherent set of feelings, intentions,
desires, beliefs, and thoughts that transcend specifi c contexts.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 4-year-old naturally strive to learn?

As they reach their fourth birthday, most children pretty much know what
other people expect from them, and they can communicate what they want.
Starting in the middle of the fourth year, however, a whole new range of
abilities emerges. Children learn to infl uence others using persuasion,
deception, or humour. They can take on multiple roles or voices, at least in
their play, and they learn that a person’s interests, beliefs, and intentions can
change over time and according to circumstances, while, at the same time,
maintaining a consistency or integrity over time.

“From three years onwards, the child can attribute to others thoughts and
feelings that are different to her own. This is an important intellectual and
conceptual leap.” (Karmiloff-Smith 1994, p. 224). And starting at age 4, there
is yet another leap, which Astington qualifi es as a true watershed leading to
a whole new range of abilities (Astington, 1991, p. 159). So, for example,
when speaking of themselves, and others, 4-5 year-old spontaneously refer

164

to a whole array of inner feelings, such as sadness, happiness, pride, guilt
and shame, and they evoke mental states and capabilities, such as believing,
knowing, remembering, and forgetting.

In Astington’s view, there are many experimental tasks that 3-year-olds
cannot do and that 4 and 5-year-olds can do (Astington, 1991, p. 159). The
tasks Astington refers to involve the understanding of another person’s false
beliefs, and the ability to distinguish between appearance and reality.

While many researchers in the theories of mind tradition claim a major
breakthrough takes place at the age of 4, many 4-year-olds still have
diffi culties in attributing false beliefs to others, and/or to distinguish between
appearance and reality. In the light of this, the so-called “false belief”
experiments are discussed in the next section (5-6 years).

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

In their pretend play, 4-year-olds engage in elaborate talk about who’s being/
doing what, and how each player should act, and what they should say and
do, in order to respect the personal traits of the character, or part. Children
also invent many complex scenarios. Multiple characters are used. More
feelings are expressed in their play.

Four-year-olds begin to recognize the nuances of complex social emotions,
like sadness, joy, loneliness, embarrassment, shame, or guilt. So, for example,
a 4-year-old may describe sadness as “there are tears in your heart”. In
their narratives, children begin to address the social or personal causes
and behavioural consequences of a person’s inner feelings (Dunn, Brown,
Beardsall, 1990). More impressive, as they reach their fi fth birthday, many
children begin to grasp that people may have mixed feeling about things
(Harris, 1989). They now show genuine remorse when they hurt or offend
others, entailing again that they can feel what others are feeling.

In general, at this age, children become better at sharing, cooperating, and
helping each other. They play follow-the-leader types of games. They begin
to play board games where they need to take turns and cooperate. All this
requires an accurate understanding of other people’s mindsets.

SUPPORT:
What can caregivers do to support this natural development?
©2004 The LEGO Group. All Rights Reserved.

165

Show empathy for your child, and he will learn to empathise with you and
others. You may encourage a 4-year-old to help care for pets, or even take
care of a younger sibling, with supervision, of course. Four-year-olds love
being trusted to care for others after they have shown they know how to be
gentle.

Let your child to play with other children. And, every now and then, be a
part in your child’s pretend and role-playing activity (if invited to do so!).
This will help her feel how different people, of different ages and walks of
life, negotiate play. Help her express her feelings through play, and imagine
scenarios in which the child is encouraged to take on multiple roles and
voices, i.e. switch role, say from mama to baby, from big bad bully to poor
little puppy. This is important to help a child “feel for” what others may feel.
Pretend play offers a safe terrain for such explorations.

Four-year-olds love to listen to stories and they start to pretend-read and
write. Show them, tell them and let them show-and-tell. Play verbal variants
of peek-a-boo, ‘Ride-a-Cock-Horse’, ‘This-is-the-Way-the-Ladies-Ride’. If
your child shows interest, try board games, where he learns to take turns and
cooperate. Help him be a good loser and respect players who may do better
than him. In short, encourage any activities that help your child de-centre
(i.e. see his partner’s point of view) while not giving up his stance. Both are
needed to understand other.

World – Making Sense of it All

WORLD – EXPLORING AND INVESTIGATING
From Wonders to Inquiries. Four-year-olds are curious about how things
work and about how people act and behave. They wonder about the
passage of time and about how things change over time. They puzzle about
how the trajectories of moving objects are coordinated in time and space.
Four year-olds hold their own views of how things come about and impact
one another, and of why things look/act the way they do. They develop their
own intuitions about how people differ from things, and how people and
things originate, grow, age or erode, and dissipate.

Children at this age like to discover things for themselves and to fi gure things
out through hands-on experimentation. Some children will spend hours
taking objects apart and putting them back together. Others may hesitate
to break things apart but will vary their ways of interacting with things as a

166

way to discover how they react. Others like to re-confi gure a same object,
or collection of objects, so that it serves many purposes. In all cases, initial
forms of trial and error (messing about) lead the way to more directed forms
of exploration (fi nding out).

In this process, the child learns a great deal about the world. Four-year-olds
have their own views of what causes things to happen, in which order, and
why. They develop their own intuitions about how things, or people, evolve
over time (also called “diachronic thinking”) and how they move about in
and confi gure space (referred to in the literature as topological and geometric
relations). These views, we shall see, remain essentially “egocentric.”

COMPETENCIES:
What does a 4-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Four-year-olds like to take on tough tasks, and they now pursue their interests,
even when interrupted, over fairly long periods of time. They like to be taken
seriously in their attempts. This striving for initiative is synonymous with
going at things hands on and heads in, which serves them well in many
respects. Four-year-olds excel in the art of intelligent “messing about,” which
is none other than their own privileged means to fi guring out how things
work.

A child’s understanding of causality increases a great deal during this period,
as she now predicts outcomes of actions before they occur. At the same
time, her conceptions of how things come about and impact one another
are still animistic. The child endows many things, especially things that move
funnily, with people-like qualities, and her outlook is more “magical” than
“logical.” So, for example, four-year-olds may explain the origin of lakes as
being caused by a giant who made big holes with his footsteps, which were
then fi lled by the rain.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain these competencies?

Four-year-old children are curious and eager to learn: They ask a hundred
questions that leave many adults perplexed: “Where does the sun go at
night? Where does the moon go during the day? What makes the rain?
How do airplanes fl y?” More than 3-year-olds, children of this age like to
fi nd their own answers to why things work the way they do. Their favoured
technique to achieve this is directed exploration.

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Four-year-olds are pretty aware of the present time and they can tell you
about the past. The future is still hard to comprehend. Most 4-year-olds
have trouble gauging how long an incident lasts. They tend either to over- or
underestimate time.

While most 4-year-olds have a fairly good sense of size relationships, many
still think that the tallest person in a group ought to be the oldest or, more
impressive, the taller the older.

Probably because they still ‘animate” things in their minds, many 4-year-
olds still have “irrational” fears, such as fear of the dark, of monsters, and of
masks, even if they know the monsters don’t exist and the masks hide mom’s
face. Such fears lessen as children enter the elementary school years (Bauer,
1976).

SUPPORT:
What can caregivers do to support this natural development?

It is important, at this age, to take your child’s hundred questions seriously,
no matter how diffi cult the answers! Even more important is to encourage
his initiative. Enjoy your child’s eagerness to experiment and try out things,
and appreciate his ability to come up with many clever explanations to the
most obscure philosophical queries.

Three rules of thumb at this age are: 1) Respond to your child’s questions,
yet don’t impose your adult take on things, 2) Don’t get caught up in
drilling your child to become ready for school. At this age, the best way to
prepare a child for school, and life, is to support her initiative. 3) ‘Teach
her that it’s worth taking the time, and making the detours, needed to
pursue her interests. So, for example, if the child gets discouraged or
repeatedly avoids obstacles, renew her interest by suggesting an exciting
next step, or surprise her by taking an unusual stance on things that
intrigue her.

WORLD – SEEKING LOGIC
“One, Two, Three … A Lot”. Four-year-olds draw many lessons from their
experience. Some are about the world, others are about the “logic” that
drives the world, and still others about people’s actions on the world.
Children detect regularities and they make inferences. They generalize and
they schematize. They infer laws and they establish rules. While acting in
the world, in other words, children soon transcend both action and object

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to focus on their underlying relations. What matters are the “invisible”
relations, patterns and gestalts, and the forms, both static and dynamic, that
keep singular elements in a certain relation.

Four-year-old children build their own mental model, or knowledge structure
that brings order and coherence to their understanding of things. This being
said, the pre-operational categories that 4-year-old children establish are still
empirical rather than logical, i.e. based on how objects, including people,
resist or yield to their solicitations.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 4-5 year-old naturally strive to learn?

Four-year-olds are curious and explorative. Most children take on a very
“hands-on” approach, yet, they also gauge the consequences of their actions
in the light of what they expected, or hoped for. In other words, they put
their “heads in” as they mess about with their hands.

While they think things through, in action, children also learn to think
logically— even if, at this age, the child is still in the re-operational stage.
So, for example, a 4-year-old may group and nest things according to
similarities and differences (“These two belong together; this one is a
part/member of that”), or they may order things (“I’ll put them from small
to big”]. The child also infers many unseen relationships, she predicts
outcomes, and she generalizes from single cases. Logic proper (or logical
necessity) sets in as soon as the child can say: “ It has to be that way.” In
general, the idea that things ought to occur in a certain way by necessity
is at the heart of a person’s logical thinking—even if that person’s “logic”
is still pre-logical!

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Four-year-olds understand relative amounts such as “more, less, bigger,
smaller, shorter, taller, fatter, thinner, older, younger.” They also use
adjectives such as big/little, few/many. They start to count, and they classify
and order objects accordingly. Consistent with these descriptions, a 4-year-
old will cluster small elements, middle ones, and big ones when asked to
build a staircase out of sticks of different sizes (when the differences are
not immediately perceptible and require measurement or one-to-one
correspondence).

169

Children at this age may “count” from 1 to 10 in a rote fashion but do not
yet understand what numbers stand for. They mostly use numerals to name
things instead of counting proper.

Children at this age like games of order and disorder. They can fi nd missing
objects in a picture and they can categorize or group things by matching
elements by size, shape, colour, or quantity. They tend to concentrate on
details and miss the whole.

SUPPORT:
What can caregivers do to support this natural development?

Adults often mistake their young children’s “counting’ [“1,2,3,4,…10”] for
knowledge about numbers when in reality the children recite a number
sequence in much the same way as they sing a little song. Conversely,
adults may think that their 4-year-olds are just playing when they persist in
building-and-undoing towers, in placing elements in and out of containers,
or in putting together things that, in the child’s view, “belong together.”

One important rule of thumb, in trying to introduce young children to math,
or logic, is this: Allow for playful explorations of “math beyond counting”
and of “logic beyond formulas.” One way of doing this is to let children
play with materials that embody deep mathematical or logical ideas. For
example, in their play with construction materials, such as LEGO bricks,
children perform many informal investigations involving mathematical ideas.
They stack unit bricks to a particular height, extend them for a certain length,
and determine just the right size brick to use in a particular place. They learn
that some bricks are half the size of others, and more.

Creations – Realising Visions

CREATIONS – IMAGINING
Serious Play. Make-believe activities and humour are two privileged windows
into a child’s creative mind. This and the next year mark the high seasons
of pretend and fantasy play, as well as of Stage 3 humour, as defi ned by
McGhee.

In their pretend play, children of this age incorporate many situations and
relationships that they have observed, changing habitual outcomes, and
playing out “ideal variations,” often to their benefi t. To do so, 4-year-olds

170

stage and enact elaborate plots, change voices according to character, and
assume different roles. This being said, a 4-year-old’s pretend scenarios are
often pretty close to everyday activities: 4-year-olds love to play grocery
store, or restaurant, or pretend they are going to the doctor or dentist.
Four-year-olds’ sense of humour becomes more verbal, though physical
and visual humour are still funny. While Stage 3 humour sets in, 4-year-
olds still enjoy earlier forms of humour. According to McGhee, four-year-
old children begin to appreciate what he calls “conceptual incongruities,”
a form of humour where language is used to alter the defi ning features of a
concept (McGhee, 1984). The use of incorrect words, like calling a mouth
an eye or a car an airplane, or inverting sex roles, (e.g. boys dress as girls),
remains funny even to a 4-year-old. Understandably, a four-year-old has
only recently sorted out gender identity, and thus this sort of play may be
a way to play with this new understanding, to turn it over and fool around
with it.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 4-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Children of this age generally engage in make-believe as a means to become
acquainted with, and take possession of, everyday situations, which may or may
not be scary or threatening, or just confusing. Their play reveals how closely they
have been observing adult behaviour and they may add a new twist as well!

Beyond using pretence to explore and work out many puzzling aspects of
everyday life, some children, at this age, also start inventing fantasy worlds
and creatures, and playing monsters and princesses in wonderland , although
this trend will more fully evolve in the sixth year.

According to McGhee, a four-year-old cannot understand most puns or the
double meanings in riddles (due to their linguistic complexity), but they
can appreciate the humorous resolutions in simple cartoons. Incongruous
drawings or pictures (an elephant in a tree, a bicycle with square wheels) are
also considered humorous at this stage (McGhee 1979, pp. 74–75).

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Because of their fl ourishing fantasy life, children of this age make up all kinds
of marvels in their head. Yet, they are often prone to nightmares. Likewise,
children may play monsters and know that monsters don’t “really” exist, but

171

they may still be afraid if a friend wears a scary mask. These fears tend to
diminish as the child reaches his sixth birthday.

In children’s pretend play, dolls and stuffed animals now engage in lengthy
dialogues, and the children themselves use language, in addition to gestures,
as a central component of their play. This not only advances and extends
their language skills but also allows them to play with language itself through
the use of rhyme and/or nonsense words.

Children at this age fi nd it hilarious when people change roles, and especially
when they take on roles that don’t “fi t” them. They giggle as the “actor”
plays out her awkward personae. In addition to silly acts, they also love silly
drawings, and silly word games.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

Don’t underestimate the importance of make-believe activities in young
children’s learning. They are a child’s way of handling puzzling situations,
both affective and cognitive. Thinking creatively, or “out of the box,” helps
transcend habitual ways of doing things.

A word of precaution: while some form of displacement is always present
in pretence, teasing, and joking, incongruity alone won’t suffi ce to create
enjoyment. Incongruity may just as well generate interest, fear, amusement
or confusion, depending upon context. This is why a safe and relaxed
atmosphere, as well as clear “play signals,” is essential to communicate to a
child: ‘It’s OK, we are in play mode’. Only in a safe atmosphere will a child
be happy to explore, play out, and work through risky or puzzling situations
through pretend play.

A rule of thumb: let the children play, and play with them if invited. Play
genuinely, and not didactically. Use words and gestures to negotiate who is
who in the pretend world, to which children will happily respond, if ready or
willing. Provide engaging “starters”, like “Let’s pretend I’m the baby and you
are the mama. And now…let’s pretend “I am a baby cat…meow, meow…
and you a big lion… and now the lion gets really hungry….”

CREATIONS – ENACTING AND CREATING
From Scribbles to Meaning: What did I write? Five-year-olds speak their
mind in a hundred languages. They do so in words, gestures, and through

172

enactments: They perform, sing, and dance. They dress up and act out. They
pretend and role-play. At the same time, as their verbal and acting skills
improve, fi ve-year-olds also like to capture, or freeze, otherwise fl eeting
events, such as music, movement or rhythm, through drawing and early
forms of writing (often pretend writing) and they become obsessed with
making sense of the signs and scribbles produced by others. In sum, children
start to read before they know how to decipher, and they scribble before
they write and draw. The same goes for music and musical notation.

As mentioned before, children are born into a world of signs, symbols
and human-made artefacts. Before they reach their 5th birthday, most
early school-age children have become eager and ready, developmentally
speaking, to appropriate these tools and start making their own original
contributions.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 4-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Four-year-old children are decent narrators and eager notators – both of
these competencies evolve side by side. Besides playing (pretend-play is still
thriving at this age), fi ve-year-olds like to engage in conversations, and they
spend much more time drawing, reading, and writing. Moreover, they are
deeply interested in what their drawings mean!

In their written productions, four-year-olds enter a new stage, called “the
naming of scribbling stage” (Brittain, 1979), during which the child may not
initiate a drawing (or scribbling) with a particular intent in mind, yet his work
takes on meaning as he moves along.

As the child gets closer to her fi fth birthday, she progresses toward what’s
referred to as the “early representational stage” of drawing (Brittain, 1979).
“Objects and people appear in her drawings in what seem to be shorthand
representations, that is as symbols rather than as portrayals of the way she
actually sees them” (Anselmo and Franz, 1995. p. 391).

The writings of a fi ve-year-old mostly consist of curly, curvy lines that mock
writing. A “simulacrum” of adult writing, these early forms of pretend writings
are no more than loosely connected strings of scribbles. However, studies
by Ferreiro and Teberosky show that these “writings before the letter” are,
in fact, rather principled, at least to the experts who know how to interpret
them, integrating many features that, in the child’s view, characterise the

173

world of letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs (Ferreiro and Teberosky,
1982).

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?
Children at this age like to play-act and to dress up in costumes. They enjoy
singing and dancing as a way of expressing their feelings, and their play-acts
become more choreographed as time goes on. The children talk both within
and about their play, and their plots get more sophisticated.

Besides play-acting, or performing, the 4-year-old also indulges in drawing,
playful scribbles, and pretend-writing. Four-year-olds love to write shopping
lists or send letters to friends. Noting that a child’s “writing,” at this age,
becomes clearly differentiated from drawing and other forms of notations
(e.g. writing numbers, or musical notations), or inscriptions (e.g. copying
geometric forms or patterns). This does not mean, however, that the child
won’t combine all those forms on a same sheet of paper. Quite to the
contrary: many children love to do exactly that!

As he paints, the child now holds his paintbrush with his thumb and fi ngers
instead of his fi st, and he holds the paper in place with the hand opposite
from the one in which he is holding the paintbrush. He is able to copy a
cross, a square, and a simple word such as ‘cat’ (Anselmo and Frantz, 1995.
p. 391).

In sum, 4-year-olds express themselves through dancing, drawing, crafting,
making puppet shows, singing songs, repeating nursery rhymes, and acting
out stories. They also add to their repertoire; early forms of drawing and
pretend writing.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

Storytelling, using books as a support, constitutes a very precious moment
to acquaint young children with literacy in playful ways. Young children
love to listen to stories, and they love it even more when they know that
their favourite stories are concealed in books they can ask to be read and re-
read, often the exact same ways, again and again. Children at this age love
to be guided into imaginary worlds through a combination of voice, strings
of world on a page, and image which they can look at and fantasize about.
Indeed, the lap of a parent or care-giver provides a comforting context in

174

which many 3- and 4-year-olds start to improvise, or “pretend-read” aloud
as they follow with their fi nger the marks on the page or point to the pictures
or illustrations

Obviously, there is more to becoming literate than listening to stories, pointing
to images, and pretending to read. The growing child will eventually have to
learn to crack the code, or decipher written signs and symbols. This being
said, forcing a 4-year-old into deciphering and producing letters, outside of
dialogic play contexts, can be counterproductive! As Stevenson so eloquently
puts it: “to pass from hearing literature to reading it, is to take a great and
dangerous step […] Those who once read aloud to us sang to their own tune
the books of childhood. Whereas once we can read for ourselves, we have
to approach the silent inexpressive type alone” (Donaldson, 1984).

The best introduction to literacy, at this age, simply consists of supporting
a child’s natural interest in what her drawings mean. Let her draw. Ask her
what she drew. Write down on her drawing (or, better yet, on removable
sticky notes) what she told you. Read it aloud to her the next day. Improvise
other possibilities. Turn her commented drawings into little booklets. The
idea here is to play with the notion that print, or handwriting, like drawing or
storytellings, all convey meaning.

Digital tools may, in some case, be used to allow young children, age 4 up,
to create and organize story elements playfully, by using tangible or physical
building blocks, such as digital tiles, images, cards. Two examples of tangible
Tale-Telling-Toys include, Tell-Tale (Annany, 2001), and PETS – Personal
Electronic Teller of Stories (Druin and Hendler, 2000. p. 73-107). Of course,
one should also be aware that there is much junk on the shelves, sold under
the noble motto “educational toy that will make your child smarter (or more
creative) earlier.” Caveat emptor!

175

Part 4.: Early School Years by age Year

5 – 6 Years
Me – Being Me

ME – USING MY BODY
Swing With Others, Swing With Things. The main areas of a 5-year-old’s
physico-motor development remain, as was the case for 4-year-old: a
growing sense of balance (static and dynamic), an increased perceptual-
motor integration (i.e. being able to produce, or imitate, a gesture one sees
someone else doing), greater body awareness (i.e., body concept, laterality
or right-left discrimination, and directionality), and temporal-perceptual
awareness, or sense of rhythm.

One noticeable change is that 5–6-year-olds now love to get in the fl ow of
things, and in sync with people.

Like their younger counterparts, 5 –6-year-old children use their bodies, and
extensions like pens, forks and knifes, or hammers, to control other objects
or actions: from surfaces, to food, to pegs and nails. However, more than
younger children, 5–6-year-olds seem to relentlessly try to coordinate, say,
their marches or dances, with music from a favourite record, or to synchronize
their movements with that of other people, and things, using both visual
and auditory clues. In other words, fi ve-year-olds become obsessed with
choreography! They show improved and more concerted, or planned, abilities
at controlling their movements in time and space, and in relation with others.
They use both the sound they hear and movements they see to help them
monitor their own movements, and get in synchrony with others.

COMPETENCIES:
What does a 5–6-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Five- to six-year-olds’ improved balance allows them to stand on tip-toe, or
on one foot, for a few seconds, and to swing each leg separately for 5 swings.
They can walk backwards heel-to-toe for four steps or more, and their jumping
has progressed to two-foot takeoff and two-foot landing, with a preliminary
crouch and swing of the arm from back to front. In ball play, they can walk up
and kick a stationary ball with a full swing of the leg and compensate use of
the arms to aid in balance (Anselmo and Franz, 1995. p. 384).

176

Most 5–6-year-olds can now imitate positions of other people, in games like
“statues,” and they start to imitate another person’s movements, provided
they are simple enough. Imitating movements from left to right or right to
left, and/or diagonals, is still diffi cult at this age.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

By their sixth birthday, most children can dress and undress without
assistance, and they now proudly tie knots that hold! Many have learned,
and love, to tie their own shoelaces. They spread food with a table knife,
use scissors to cut out squares and other simple shapes, and they bathe
themselves, with great joy, only with supervision.

In kindergarten, 5–6-year-old children learn to copy triangles, rectangles with
diagonals, to print the alphabet, and to write numbers. They draw recognizable
pictures, often adding ground and sky and attending to size relations.

SUPPORT:
What can caregivers do to support this natural development?

Play with your child and make sure you propose activities that involve other
children. Many activities can be imagined to help 5–6-year-olds become
physically fi t and increase their body awareness, sense of balance, and
perceptuo-motor integration.

Many 5 –6-year-olds like to play “statues’, in which a person’s position is
imitated by children. As soon as your child masters static “statues” type-
games, you can move to more dynamic “moving statues” type games. The
child, at this age, learns to invent games with other children and to embark
in choreographed “dance and movement.”

Continue to use B.C. Gilliom’s basic movement education for 5–6-year-olds
children (as mentioned in the previous stage). Yet, make sure you alternate
between imitation-games (mutual attuning) and improvisation (creating your
own). Imitation is fun because it creates synchrony: This is what we like when we
dance with others. Creating one’s own is fun because it allows for improvisation
and self-expression. This is what we like when we dance for ourselves.

To facilitate eye-hand coordination and fi ne motor skills, let your child build
models, using smaller pieces. Let him draw, write, cut and glue. Give him

177

fi nger paints, and chalk. Even video or computer games can be benefi cial for
eye-hand coordination.

ME – KNOWING MYSELF
Knowing Who I Am and Controlling My Act. The sixth year marks a signifi cant
breakthrough in a child’s self-knowledge: the understanding that, indeed, a
person’s inner states can be different from her outer expression. And not
surprisingly, that’s also when children learn to control their own impulses,
desires, and needs, and to explain why they do what they do! That’s also
when they learn that their inner feelings can be held to themselves; in other
words, the child doesn’t not to have to be transparent all the time. This can
lead to increased sensitivity to the effects of their actions or utterances on
others, but it can also lead to duplicity of sorts.

Children of this age begin to genuinely understand that there may be some
advantages in refraining, say, from hitting or screaming. And their grasp of
why brute force may not be a winning strategy goes beyond mere social
acknowledgement or generally accepted practice. For example, a 5–6-year-
old may feel hurt by what another child says or does and, at the same time,
start to understand that this person may not have meant to harm, or was too
little to understand.

Learning to control her impulses enables the child to act more responsibly
in her interactions with others. More important, it allows her to learn to
negotiate her needs and wants. While self-control is important, too much of
it can be stifl ing. Ego resilience refers to a person’s ability to modify the level
of self-control to meet the demands of changing situations. In other words,
that the person is adaptable and can exercise judgement over how much
self-control is warranted in a given situation.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 5–6-year-old naturally strive to learn?

A 5–6-years-old’s view of how he, and other babies, come to be is still very
concrete. If told that “Daddy plants a seed in Mommy’s belly” children of
this age may naturally think of gardening, and develop the wildest ideas
about what’s going on in Mom’s belly. “Such simple statements by adults
may be the cause of colourful ideas we attribute to preschool children (e.g.
fi nding babies in cabbage patch). The idea that ‘Daddy plants a seed in the
mother’ may give raise to unusual ideas about plants growing” (Anselmo &
Franz, 1995. p.412).

178

At this age, sickness is still mostly explained by external causes, such as
contagion. Yet, the concept of contagion itself is less “magical” at this age.
It is more like a causal mechanical kind of infl uence. This being said, many
children, at this age still use immanent justice—that is a tendency to blame
themselves i.e. their own behaviour, for their own illness and pain. In this
realm, age differences tend to blur.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

A 5–6-year-old’s ways of categorizing people and/or creatures (emotionally
or cognitively), including themselves, goes beyond physical clues to include
character traits or mindsets (see section on Us in Part 2 on children’s evolving
theories of mind).

Five- to six-year-olds start to be attracted by, and identify with, other people
outside the family like teachers, or the cool kids on the block or in the
classroom. In their pretend play, they become princesses, heroes, or wild
dragons, all with their special powers. Heroes in books and TV become
important to help them shape their identities. So are best friends, although at
this age, they may change often.

A fi ve- to six-year-old’s views on how they came to be, and what makes for a
healthy, happy person, or a sick, sad one, are still rather animistic/mechanical,
although, as they get closer to their sixth birthday, many children enter into
the stage of concrete operations, and as this happens, they develop more
“objective” views of themselves, including their origins and inner workings.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development ?

Help your child keep a balance between two extremes: being an under-
controller or being an over-controller. Easier said than done! Under-
controllers are often described as expressive, extroverted, spontaneous,
distractible, unable to delay gratifi cation, and having many but short
lived enthusiasms and interests. Over-controllers are often described as
constrained, inhibited, introverted, showing minimal expression of emotions,
non-distractible, organized, sticking to their interests.

One way of helping children fi nd a balance between over- and under-
controlling is through role-play. Especially at this age, role-play is an

179

excellent way of getting youngsters to “put themselves in other people’s
shoes” and “feel what they feel” if acted upon in certain ways. Imagine
scenarios where kids are encouraged to switch roles, say between hitters
and receivers, haves and have-nots, wolves and princesses. Act out the
scenes, discuss how a story could be told or felt, from different viewpoints.
Draw some ethical conclusions when relevant, or better yet, let the child
draw them.

Us – Growing Together

US – RELATING TO OTHERS
Serious Play — Becoming Industrious. Provided their relations with primary
care-givers are stable and trusting, and basic autonomy is established,
preschoolers have entered the phase of their psycho-social development
called initiative. Now, as initiative itself becomes established, yet another
Eriksonian stage sets in: Five-year-olds learn to become industrious. What
industry adds to initiative is the satisfaction of doing “the right thing”, or
doing what it takes to “get things done” and “done well.”

According to Erikson, between the ages of fi ve and eight, children become
industrious, i.e. they become increasingly eager to direct their energies into
producing things. They start following through on projects such as building
forts, or cooking a meal. Elkind (1970) has called this the “Robinson Crusoe age”
because “the enthusiasm and detail with which Crusoe described his activities also
characterizes children’s own unfolding sense of industry” (Anselmo and Franz,
1995. p. 428-429).

Children’s sense of industry is enhanced when their efforts are
encouraged and their completed projects are noticed and rewarded.
In many countries, children who enter Erikson’s stage of industry also
start schooling and receive some systematic instruction. This is why it
is sometimes hard to tell whether children become industrious because
they face the expectations of school, or whether school provides a new
context to shape, for good or bad, their inherent unfolding sense of
industry. Whatever the case may be, there seems to be a developmental
fi t between a child’s growing sense of industry, as defi ned by Erikson, and
her socialization beyond family life.

COMPETENCIES:
What does a 5-year-old naturally strive to learn?

180

The industrious child likes to follow through on a task he sets himself and
to complete things he began. He also learns to carry out his part in a co-
operative effort. When a child’s efforts are not properly recognized, or
the fruit of their work is seen as inadequate, children may, according to
Erikson, feel unable to live up to external and internal expectations of social
interactions, physical feats, or mental discipline.

Obviously, 5-year-olds are only starting to become industrious. Their
willingness and abilities to undertake and pursue tasks is still tentative and
brittle. Their following up on things, caring for outcomes, and negotiating
parts in cooperative undertakings will become more obvious as the child
reaches her 6th or 7th birthday and peaks around the age of 8 (see years
6–8).

Pretend and role-play are at their height at this age, allowing the child to re-
enact many puzzling social relations, control their aggression, and practice
empathy. Many feelings and emotions are expressed and negotiated through
play. While play provides a privileged test-bed to check out some of the risks
that taking initiative and becoming industrious involve, the child, at this age,
also likes to transcend play itself, and engage in what Papert has termed
“hard fun” (Papert 1993) In other words, play is OK but it has to be serious,
challenging, and “hard.”

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain these competencies?

While still dependent upon their parents, children at this age become
increasingly attracted by other children and by adults outside the family. They
start to make friends at school or at the playground, and their friendships are
more stable. This is also an age at which children start going to group activities,
like sports or scouts, and take music, gymnastics, or dance classes.

Five-year-olds can contribute to a conversation among adults by bringing
something relevant to the topic being discussed, and they are better able to
gauge when it is appropriate, or not, to say certain things. In other words,
they can monitor the complexity, tone, and style of speech, depending on
whom they talk to and based on their assumptions of how other people feel
and think. Beyond content, they understand context.

This and the previous year mark the highpoint of pretend and role play.
Children continue to enjoy follow-the-leader games. As they reach their

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6th birthday, children increasingly enjoy board games, and Pokemon-type
of item collecting and swapping games, where they learn to take turns
and cooperate. Children of this age are not especially good at losing in
competitive games, nor do they like to be criticized or stick out of a group
as being different.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

To develop a sense of industry, children need sensitive parents, teachers,
and recreation leaders, who can individualize expectations, and help the
child channel her exuberance into a long-term project she enjoys. It can be
important for children at this age, to engage in at least one fi eld of endeavour
that they like—be it academic, athletic, or musical.

A fi rst rule, when it comes to foster initiative and industry, is to let the child
play with other children. Peer relations are a key to practicing social skills.
Especially at this age, a child’s fi rst real lasting friendships help her immensely
in learning to bond with others while preserving his right to take initiative.

Invite other children to your home. Children at this age love to play games in
groups. Help your child to lose gracefully in a competitive game, and besides
competition, engage them in open-ended, cooperative and turn-taking games.
Also important at this age: Encourage your child to share what she does at
school, discuss with her what she sees on TV or reads in a book. If she asks for
it, give her ideas on how she may bring some of what she likes a step further…

Educators have invented many games through which children learn to shape
and sharpen their relations to others (see next section on 6-7 years). Most
important, however, when it comes to teaching social skills, is to be a good
role model. At school, this may imply a caring ambience, in which each
child is appreciated for what she can offer, and where the group builds on
individual contributions to move ahead, as a group (Reggio-Emiglia Schools,
1998).

US – UNDERSTANDING OTHERS
Awareness of Others’ Beliefs. In the sixth year, children become better at
customizing their ways of relating based on their assumptions of how others
feel, act, or think at a given moment, and under given circumstances. In
other words, they clearly recognize that moods, intents, and behaviours can
change over time, and across context.

182

Beyond understanding that other people think differently, 5-year-olds begin
to grasp which feelings or beliefs a person may hold. A good example of
such understanding is provided by “theory of mind” research on false beliefs
and the appearance/reality distinction.

Research on false beliefs (Perner and Wimmer, 1985) indicates that, by the
time they reach their fi fth birthday, most children start to understand that
a person may believe something (that the child knows to be) false. They
can identify and describe another person’s (false) belief, and anticipate
that the (false) believer will act on the basis of her (false) belief. So, for
example, if a child knows her friend was not in the kitchen while mom
moved the cookies from the drawer to the top of the closet, she will
correctly guess: Her friend, the non-knower, will look for the cookies
in the wrong place, namely the drawer. At the same age, children also
fi rst understand the distinction between what something is (reality) and
what someone might believe it is (appearance) (Flavell, Flavell, & Green,
1983).

This being said, many pre-school children still have diffi culties in
conceptualizing what exactly the inner, psychological states of other people
may be. It is not until the concrete operational stage, around the age of six,
that a full appreciation of inner psychological states becomes possible. This
is true whether the child is judging the feelings, thinking, or understanding
of other people.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 5-year-old naturally strive to learn?

During the sixth year, a child’s abilities to refl ect upon and converse about
inner states grows by leaps and bounds, and is readily used to monitor
and optimize social relations. The child now shares her refl ections about
emotions, intentions, desires, and thoughts. He can do so even outside of
playful contexts, such as formal interviews (Astington, 1991).

Based on his assumptions on how others feel and think, the child becomes
better at adjusting his speech [both complexity and tone] to fi t his
interlocutor’s engagement, age, and mood. So, for example, a 5-year-old
starts to monitor, or check out regularly, if a younger child understands
what he says (“You see what I mean?”). He will also naturally use shorter
sentences and articulate his thoughts more simply than when He speaks to
older kids or to adults.

183

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Five to six years marks the highpoint for make-believe play. Children develop
increasingly fl exible and sophisticated plots, they change voices according
to character, and they assume different roles. They also use language more
extensively to communicate in their play, and much of what they say
is meta-linguistic, or meta-cognitive, i.e. they talk about how to talk and
act. Through their role-play, the children vicariously feel-and-live through
different characters, and they take on and act out other people’s wishes,
beliefs, intentions.

At this age, children also want to be taken seriously as a partner, beyond
play. They enjoy taking care of others, and they will ask their parents to give
them pets to play with.

SUPPORT:
What can caregivers do to support this natural development ?

Help your child express and communicate her feelings. Create a safe context
to discuss the consequences of certain emotional reactions to/from other
people. Imagine scenarios that can be played out on safe ground. Focus on
role-play. Put the child in the role of the giver and taker, of the aggressor
and the aggressed, of the potent and the weak. Discuss the consequences of
being “dissed” (disrespected) or accepted by others.

One of the best ways to prepare children to understand “reversibility” in
social transactions is to present him with hypothetical scenarios in the
fantasy realm. Again, do not pressure any child to disclose his feelings if
he doesn’t want to. Damon (1977, 1980) developed hypothetical stories
and presented them to children from the ages 4 to 12 to study their social
reasoning. Similar stories, involving moral paradoxes, can be imagined and
used for educational purposes.

World – Making Sense of it All

WORLD – EXPLORING AND INVESTIGATING
From Inquiry to Experimentation. Five-year-old children are quite profi cient
in mentally working through solutions to problems, thus moving away from
intelligent trial and error and “messing about” and engaging more readily in

184

directed inquiry. Like young private investigators, they love to make guesses
before they try out something! They have become experimentalists.

In their explanations, children of this age still tend to ascribe people-like
qualities to inanimate objects, especially objects that move strangely, as
if self-propelled, and their thinking remains essentially magical. These
forms of thinking remain prevalent among most pre-operational fi ves,
although as they reach their 6th birthday, many children start to think
more “logically.” They are soon ready to enter the so-called concrete
operational stage.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 5-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Five-year-olds continue to produce a steady stream of questions, such as,
“Does the moon follow us?” “Why is the grass green?” etc…yet, more than
4-year-olds, their questions are relentless and orchestrated. Indeed, many
children, at this age, start to leverage their sense of initiative by becoming
industrious. According to Erikson, they want to bring their projects to
completion, succeed in school, and accomplish many long-term tasks—in
and out of school. Their explanations, while sophisticated, remain essentially
“egocentric”: Animism and magical thinking lessen as the child reaches her
sixth birthday.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Children of this age are generally fascinated with everyday physics. They love
to explore such things as the way water fl ows, the impact of gravity, and other
aspects of everyday physics. They do so at length, and very thoughtfully.
This marks a transition: while the child still sees water, clouds, fi re, or trees
as human-like, he also explores more “objective” qualities through playful
experimentation.

Five-year-olds can order photographs to tell a tale that has a beginning,
middle, and an end (Montangero, 1996. p. 6).

In thinking about time, 5-year-old children start to isolate time from its spatial,
narrative, and causal underpinnings, although they cannot yet conserve time
as an invariant. Nor can they build an external clock, or metrics, to evaluate
durations and make sense of changes over time.

185

As they approach their sixth birthday, some children start to conserve
substance in certain contexts, such as pouring liquids in glasses of different
sizes, or moulding play-dough into different shapes. In such situations, the
children are no longer “fooled” by the appearances of things. They will
understand that it’s the same amount of play-dough if they roll it into a
sausage or divide it into many smaller pieces, or they reason, “I won’t have
more milk just because I pour it in a glass than is high and thin”. While
obvious to most adults, these kinds of understandings are built by children
over the fi rst six years of their lives.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

Researchers generally agree that children need occasions to ask many
questions and to explore many answers for themselves, with the
encouragement and support of adults and peers. Pierce, in particular, has
shown that both the number and types of questions asked by a child are
good predictors of how well students will understand subject matter later,
when taught in school (Pierce, 1990).

The lessons to draw from this are pretty obvious: Instead of focussing on
teaching or providing “right” answers, be an enabler or a facilitator! Let your
child explore, tickle her curiosity, and support her initiative. There will be
plenty of time, as she enters school, to be confronted with “unasked for”
explanations to questions posed by others.

WORLD – SEEKING LOGIC
“Give Me a Ten”. In the sixth year, many children learn to count-and-point,
which represents great progress as compared with enumerating numerals
like a string of words. Yet, 5-year-olds still do not yet have a concept of
number to speak of, i.e. the logico-mathematical skills needed to grasp what
numbers actually stand set for as the child reaches his sixth birthday.

Typically at this age, when asked to count how many objects there are in a
basket, a child will say “one” and point to an object, then say “two” and to
another object, etc… While this looks like “real” counting, the catch is: to
the child herself counting sequences by touching objects does not mean that
each more advanced number excludes the previous ones.

Many children also still confuse the ordinal and cardinal aspects of numbers.
So, in a series of, say, 7 eggs, they will count-and-point some eggs more than

186

once and forget others altogether. There is no systematic “logical” strategy to
achieve one-to-one correspondence. Many children also still hand you the
block “called ten” when you ask them to give you “ten” blocks: the numeral
‘”ten” designates the tenth one to be pointed to/named i.e. the cardinal “ten”
is indistinct from ordinal “tenth.”

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 5-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Five-year-olds are intrigued by numerals as a system, and will ask many
questions like: “What happens after you count to 999?” Or “What is the
biggest number? …And if I add one to the biggest?” They want to know
how many fl oors a building has, and they keep track of whose building has
most.

This being said, when asked to count, most children, at this age, will count
aloud correctly, placing a fi nger on a separate block as they say each
number. Yet, two main diffi culties remain: 1) they possess no one–to-one
correspondence i.e. they point-and-count a same block more than once,
and 2) they “give you a “ten” instead of ten….

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Children of this age perform many informal investigations involving
quantifi cations. These include both counting and measuring without numbers:
stacking unit blocks to a particular height, extending them for a particular
length, and determining just the right size block to use in a particular place.

Five-year-olds like to experiment with shapes and space. As they approach
their sixth birthday, they may start to “measure things” using their footsteps,
and “count” using their fi ngers.. They may enjoy playing with pattern blocks,
Cuisenaire rods, Dienes blocks, and other manipulatives meant to embody
aspects of the number series, like regular increment (i.e. plus one).

Five-year-olds do not yet understand the ordinal, cardinal, and inclusive
aspects of numbers. Nor can they use a ruler or any other measuring units
smaller than the total continuous quantities to be compared.

187

Say “math” and most people see pages of numerals to be matched to groups
of hats, a number line, or addition problems. In fact, the real world of math is
both broader and deeper and better tailored to children’s own interests and
curiosities than commonly thought.

Leave aside counting series and the calculations involved in adding,
subtracting, multiplying, or dividing, introduce your 5-year-old to
mathematical and logical thinking through activities such as :

• Classifying: Sorting or forming groups by similar attributes. Putting together
things that belong together. Example: Sorting beads from blocks, or red
beads from blue ones, sorting shapes.

• Comparing: Establishing a relation between objects. Looking at differences
as well as similarities. Example: build a bigger or smaller tower. Playing
“who gets more” in distribution games.

• Ordering: Arranging elements in a sequence. Example: Building a chain
or a train of things. Ordering or seriating objects of incremental sizes (e.g.
biggest to smallest).

• Patterning: Ordering with repetitions, or iteration, of elements to form more
complex arrays. Patterns can be temporal (musical or rhythmic pattern)
or spatial (Tiled fl oor, Persian carpets). We speak of patterns when the
arrangements of elements exhibit some identifi able regularity, or structure.
Example: tiling games, recognize that a stripe of a shirt is a part of a pattern.
Many rich activities can be imagined involving:

– identifying patterns (see where the regularity lies, where the unit
repeats)

– describing patterns (telling what the pattern looks like)
– extending patterns (changing red green pattern to red blue pattern)
– completing patterns (fi nish a pattern already started)
– creating patterns (inventing new patterns)

Creations – Realising Visions

CREATIONS – IMAGINING
Fantasy as a Gateway into Reality. The fi fth year continues to be a high season
for make-believe activities, and it marks a transition between Stage 3 and
Stage 4 humour, as defi ned by McGhee. One signifi cant breakthrough at this

188

age is the child’s ability to move from realistic to more fi ctitious pretence.
Many fi ve-year-olds imagine and dwell in fantasy lands. Their approach is
less about creating variations around, and spoofi ng, everyday situations than
it is about producing fi ction!

In their pretend play, fi ve-year-olds imagine many elaborate plots, involving
a multitude of actors who live in fantasy worlds. The children themselves
inhabit and act out their personae, changing voices according to character,
and assuming different roles. Also noticeable at this age, characters have to
be believable and their actions relevant within a chosen world.

Many adults misinterpret the meaning of children’s fantasy life at this stage
of development, mistakenly thinking that children are trying to “escape from
reality.” Yet, a closer look at the actual scenarios that children create reveals
that their fantasy play, though it may involve stuffed animals or other more
fantastical creatures, is never very far removed from reality. As the author
John Holt put it in his classic book, How Children Learn, “Children use
fantasy not to get out of, but to get into, the real world” (Holt 1983, p. 238).
It is their way of understanding it and coming to grips with their experience,
turning it over and possessing it.

A 5-year-old’s sense of humour still often relies on “pure incongruity.” In other
words, nonsensical incongruities are amusing enough, provided they occur in
a fantasy world. “In a series of studies, McGhee (1984) found that incongruities
need to occur in a fantasy context in order to produce humour. The same
incongruities in a reality context interfere with humour. For example, if a clown
had an exaggerated nose, children (of this age) would perhaps laugh. If however,
a person on the street had a realistic ear in the usual position of her nose, humour
would likely be replaced by discomfort” (Anselmo and Franz, 1995. p. 508).

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 5-year-old naturally strive to learn?

In their pretend play, and more generally in their play, children of this age
make better use of “adapted speech” as they discuss possible scenarios,
negotiate who is doing what, suggest ideas to each other, and question and
seek answers from each other. Much of their play takes place at the “meta
level,” that is, talking about their play, organising it, etc.

Children talk within their pretend play constitutes a privileged context in
which to crack jokes and to incorporate “silliness” into their plays. The type

189

of humour at this age is riddled with incongruities and “bathroom” humour.
Another interesting feature, at this age, is that children often laugh at jokes
that they don’t understand. They recite riddles simply to make others laugh!
In other words, to a 5- or 6-year-old, non-sensical incongruity can be funny
enough, especially if it produces laughter in others!

Around 5-6 years of age, some children start to transition toward Stage 4
humour, fi nding amusement in multiple meanings, although this form
humour will more fully develop as the children reach their sixth birthday
(see next age year).

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

In their pretend play, 5-year-olds can deal with more abstract ideas about
objects or characters that are not necessarily present. So, for example, a
child may tell another: “I know a princess doesn’t wear a hat, but her sister
does ”, or “I want that monster to be meaner, greener, and scarier, and not
just dress like a kid”. While pretending, children like to indulge in silly jokes
together, and they often, though not always, love to have others (often adult
spectators) witness their play.

In general, at this age, children make a greater use of language to
communicate in their play. Most children now verbalize their thoughts, in
addition to enacting their parts. We witness dramatic changes of voice, and
longer and complex sentences. Children also express themselves through
dancing, drawing, using puppets or change of voice, singing songs, repeating
nursery rhythms, and acting out stories.

Children of this age fi nd it funny to see a clown with a large fake nose and
oversized shoes act clumsily at things that even children can do. They giggle
at the idea of milking a dog, or having a dog moo. Distortion of familiar
sights and sounds, including rhyming and nonsense words, is still a source
of humour at this age.

When watching cartoons, most 5-year-olds won’t fi nd ‘pure incongruity”
funny. Instead, they appreciate cartoons in which some resolution of an
incongruous situation is at play. An example of a funny resolution to an
incongruous situation may be when ‘Dumbo’ the elephant fi nds himself up
a tree (elephants don’t climb trees) and resolves the situation by fl ying away
(elephants don’t fl y!).

190

Some children start to engage in so-called “joke façade” which, according to
Freud, serves to disguise aggressive and otherwise taboo ideas, or behaviours.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

A child’s imagination is often seen as a passing phase of childhood that
has little to do with the real work of learning. Many parents and educators,
fearing their children may lag behind in school for lack of seriousness; try to
educate the imagination out of their children. This is not a good idea!

Imagination is a vital source of learning and understanding. Without the
ability to imagine, even the most rational of minds will spin endlessly and
become stuck in the muddy routines of the familiar. Fortunately, we don’t
need to do much to get children to use their imagination; they do it all the
time. We just need to avoid doing things that stifl e this impulse or make them
self-conscious about it: “Act your age! Stop being so silly! Will you ever
grow up?” It is perhaps wise to remember that our most creative scientists,
artists, and inventors have not lost their childlike ability to imagine “silly”
things.

Though children may be attracted to the pre-packaged fantasies delivered to
them via television or cinema, it may be a good idea to limit their TV show
time, especially at a young age. There will be plenty of time later on to
become a consumer of other people’s fantasies.

CREATIONS – ENACTING AND CREATING
I Show It, I Tell It, I Write It. In addition to speaking, play-acting, and dancing,
fi ve-year-olds become increasingly interested in capturing, recording, and
editing fl eeting events, such as music, human voice and movements, through
any medium that permits them to do so. So, for example, as they sing and listen
to music, they frequently enjoy recording the rhythms and melodies using a
tape recorder, and some children even enjoy “drawing” the sounds and rhythms
they hear on a sheet of paper. As they speak and listen to stories, they want to
make sure their favourite stories are concealed in books to be retrieved, at any
moment, for further usage: a good incentive for learning to read!

At this age, early forms of pretend play go underground or, better, they
take on new forms, paving the way to the staging and play-acting of many
elaborate shows, from puppet shows to dance and theatre! In kindergarten,
children of this age engage in arts-and-craft activities, producing many

191

artefacts, such as drawings, sculpture or glazed pottery, and other forms of
artwork—common gifts to parents!

In sum, beyond performance, fi ve-year-old children greatly improve their
drawing skills, and they start to write their fi rst letters and numbers, which
often appear as elements in their drawings. This is not to say that fi ve-year-
olds ignore the difference between, say an icon (as in a drawing), a letter or
word (as in writing), and a numeral (as in counting). Instead, children enjoy
moving seamlessly between languages, in this case written ones, bringing
them all together on a sheet of paper.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 5-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Five-year-olds are at the brink of becoming literate in the narrow sense of
learning to read and write. This being said, the child of this age is not yet
ready to let go of the immediacy and livelihood of live performance and
playful scribbles to the benefi t of deciphering those inert traces on a printed
sheet of paper. Even producing letters, words, and numerals, out of context,
can be a chore to a child of this age.

Most children of this age are still into “pretend” reading and writing. They like
to recite (as if they could read) printed words or passages in a book that they
can’t yet decipher! They use images and words as cues and placeholders for
the text. In their written messages, fi ve-year-olds mix scribble-writing and
linear mock writing, to which they start to add their own “signature”: often a
letter, or a series of letters, that stands for their name.

In her drawings “the child enters the ‘pre-schematic’ stage (Brittain, 1979). She now
draws recognizable fi gures, often adding ground and sky and attending to size
relations. Objects do not usually fl oat around in space as before, and her people
may have as many as six or seven body parts” (Anselmo and Franz, 1995. p. 391).

In kindergarten, the children will further refi ne their reading and writing
skills, and they will learn to model, draw, notate rhythm and music, and copy
geometric shapes and letters. Provided children are not forced into literacy
too early, and too rigidly, all the above skills will evolve without “killing”
their creative expression!

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to obtain these competences?

192

In their kindergarten year, most 5-year-olds can write their fi rst name and
copy shapes, such as triangles and rectangles with diagonals. When asked
to “write down” a favourite song or rhythm, they produce a row of strokes
of varying lengths to indicate fast and slow passages. The strokes are often
produced at the pace of the music.

Children of this age learn to print the alphabet using both uppercase and
lowercase letters. They write numerals from 1 to 9, and they create “pre-
schematic” drawings or paintings at an easel (Brittain, 1979)

At this age, children still draw chimneys rising at a 90° angle from the roof,
instead of vertically or perpendicular to the ground (Piaget & Inhelder, 1956;
Werner 1957).

In their play-acts, fi ve-year-olds express themselves verbally, and they do
so very well; they talk in and about the play. We hear dramatic changes of
voice, more correct grammar, and longer and more complex sentences.

More generally, 5-year-olds enjoy and acquire the ability to sequence story
elements in a linear, coherent manner. This, in turn, calls for transitional
spaces (playgrounds) in which children can mess around with story elements,
combining and recombining them until they form meaningful confi gurations
(or sequences). Children are good at creating such spaces in their free-form
fantasy play.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

The passage from speech to writing, while bringing about gains that
most children appreciate, also entails losses, often ignored by educators,
researchers, or parents (Ackermann, 1991). The written word separates
author from audience, audience from the site of the plot, and word from
voice. Speech, by contrast, is an integral part of human performance, and
punctuates a narrator’s action as it unfolds. Speech bridges what is said to
who says it, and who says it to how it is voiced (Ong, 1982).

This is why forcing a 5-year-old into reading and writing, rigidly and divorced
from any dialogic context, can be counterproductive. At this age, reading
and writing should be combined with other forms of creative expressions
familiar to the child, such as play-acts and dialogues. In this spirit, encourage
your child to share what he does at school, sees on TV, or reads in a book.

193

Read books about what they see on TV. Act out what he reads. Play video
games with them, and then play-act some of the scenes in another medium.
In other words, let the children speak in their hundred languages. Bedtime
storytelling rituals, using books as a medium, remain, even at this age, a
favourite to introduce children to literacy in a pleasant, comforting way.

Digital technologies, in particular digital styluses (e.g., the Leapfrog stylus)
can, in some cases, be useful to help a child “unlock” the meaning of words
she herself points at with her digital stylus: In effect, as she strokes the top
of a word or sentence with her “magical” stylus, the system reads the chosen
passage aloud to her. Good enough but much less fun than hearing Dad or
Mom do the same translation!

195

Part 4.: Early School Years by age Year

6-7 Years
Me – Being Me

ME – USING MY BODY
Play for Good! In the seventh year, many children become eager, besides
playing, to achieve things for real! More than before, they like to help with
household routines: From mowing grass, to trimming trees, to working in
the kitchen or in the workshop. And since they take it seriously, they like to
be taken seriously in return. They feel good when they succeed and when
their efforts and achievements are recognized. The enjoyment related to
accomplishing challenging tasks is sometimes called “hard fun” by children
this age.

Six- to seven-year-olds will spend much time trying to manoeuvre their
two-wheel bikes (the real thing) and are thrilled when they can get rid of
those baby training wheels. They will want to jump over yardsticks like “real
athletes,” and they like to run while being timed. In playing ball, they enjoy
playing with others. Although it will take one more year, or so, before they
become convinced and accomplished team players.

Obviously, 6–7-year-olds still love to fool around with peers, and be silly.
And the joy of playing alone won’t go away either! Six to seven year-olds
may not go to the playground as much. Instead, they enjoy playing in the
backyard with other children (if yard there is), to the ball fi eld or the park.

COMPETENCIES:
What does a 6–7-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Six- to seven-year-old children are strong, mobile, and agile, and they like
to share many activities with others. Their body-awareness and perceptuo-
motor integration continue to increase, and so does their sense of balance,
both static and dynamic

Six- to seven-year-olds readily engage with grown-ups in everyday activities,
or sports, and they are eager to play “hard fun” and be taken seriously. At this
age; the harder the better! A 6–7-year-old will want to carry heavy packs,
help drag logs or push a heavy table into a corner for a party. She will also

196

want to help prepare food: measures things, peeling and chopping vegetables
etc., in which case the harder don’t require strength but dexterity.

When playing ball, 6–7-year-old children can throw a tennis ball with one
hand, bounce it with one hand, and catch it with both hands. Activities that
combine movements, such as catching while running are greatly appreciated,
and open the way to many rhythmic dance/music games and specialized
sport skills

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Most 6-year-olds can ride two-wheel bikes, jump ropes three or more times
in a row, chin themselves on the bar at school, and stand on each foot
alternately, with eyes closed. They can carry a 5 kg sack of groceries the 20
feet from the car to the kitchen. They can also jump a metre or so from a
standing position, over a stick held 20 cm from the fl oor.

At school, usually fi rst-grade, children of this age can copy diamond shapes,
print their name, and write numerals. They draw, paint, glue, and cut, and
they do so better and better…

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

Cultivate your child’s growing body awareness and perceptuo-motor skills by
playing dynamic “imitation” games, such as “mirrors”, and ‘places”. Devised
by Sullivan (Sullivan, 1982a) both these games are popular among 6- to 8-
year-olds.

In mirrors: A ‘leader”, usually an adult but not necessarily, is facing a group.
The leader will perform a series of movements, and the group is asked to
do the same. In places, usually more popular among older children, the
children are invited to move around, spot places, and freeze, at the sound of
a drumbeat. The specifi c directions are “pick out a place in the room with
your eyes. Now walk to that place. Look around. Pick another place. Go
there, and then revisit each place in reverse order.

Invent your own games. Again, alternate between imitation and improvisation
games. Offer a wide repertoire of possible activities: from dance and music
to specialized sports skills. Don’t get caught up in only one mode.

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Some children may like to start playing an instrument, or to paint. Besides
all the other pleasure this can provide, the dexterity these skills demand can
greatly increase a child’s eye-hand coordination.

ME – KNOWING MYSELF
What I Feel / Think is Not Always How I Act. The seventh year marks the
beginning of concrete operations. The child is now able to refl ect upon actions
that were previously performed, and can draw conclusions – in his head.
One of the primary characteristics of concrete operations is reversibility: the
ability to mentally reverse the direction of thought. Another characteristic is
the understanding that thoughts are different from actions, and appearances
are different from reality.

The child is now able to put himself in place of other persons, which has
direct repercussions in how they perceive themselves. This ability to take
differing perspectives or points of view marks the onset of a new and more
sophisticated maturity that has ramifi cations across all the developmental
categories.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 6-7 year-old naturally strive to learn?

At the age of 6, children become increasingly aware that there are two
facets to a person’s psychological self: the inner, subjective self (what
they think and feel) and the outer, objective self (what they do). At this
level, many children still think that these two parts of a person are (or
ought to be) consistent. The young child does not know how to hold back.
She frequently blurts out whatever she thinks or feels, regardless of the
consequences. But a 6–7-year-old begins to be more discriminating and
learns to hold back or conceal her true feelings to avoid being inappropriate
or rude. Yet, according to Selman, it will take one more year before children
“really” understand that it is possible to trick and fool other people, as well
as oneself (Selman, 1981).

Starting at age 6, children’s views of their bodies and its inner workings
change. The child may still have a limited understanding of the processes
governing conception or aging. For example, he may not yet see why the
participation of both parents is necessary to create a baby (Bernstein and
Cowan, 1981). However, in general, 6-year-olds develop a more “objective”
sense of what’s happening in their bodies, of what is likely to be “good for
you”, i.e. make you healthy, or sick, and of the functions of different organs,

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For example, a 6–7-year-old knows that food goes into her stomach, that
she breathes with her lungs, and that she can feel her heart beating after she
runs around a lot. Likewise, when she gets sick, the 6–7-year-old has a fairly
good idea as to which part of her body is affected.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Children, at this age, increasingly identify with others, outside the family.
They are attracted to the cool kids in their class, form crushes on teachers,
movie stars, and rock musicians. Heroes in books and TV remain important
in their lives to help them form a sense of self.

Although 6–7-year-olds are increasingly aware of their own, and other
people’s, worth, they are still rather sensitive to criticism, and they don’t like
to stand out in the crowd as different and odd. Losing gracefully is also still
a problem at this age.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

Although children, at this age, are learning to control their emotions, and tell
their needs and wants instead of using brute force, especially when they feel
vulnerable, they may still have childish outbursts of temper.

Help your child be comfortable with who they are, and motivated to take the
time and work it needs to excel in areas that they like.

Children of this age are aware of their newfound ability to “fi gure things
out.” They love “brain teasers” and puzzles of all sorts. They love to play
“detective” and hunt for clues, or fi nd hidden objects using a “treasure
map.”

Us – Growing Together

US – RELATING TO OTHERS
Onset of Concrete Operations. The seventh year marks the highpoint of Erikson’s
stage of industry and the beginnings of Piaget’s concrete operations. This
culmination paves the ways for a cascade of new developmental breakthroughs.
Most signifi cant, the industrious child is now able to think objectively, or logically,

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about things that were previously performed through physical or concrete actions,
and to draw conclusions in the head. The child can also mentally reverse the
direction of an action, take on different perspectives, and distinguish appearance
from reality. Needless to say, this newly acquired cognitive power greatly helps
the industrious child to become ever more competent and successful in the
pursuit of her personal and social undertakings.

COMPETENCIES:
What does a 6-year-old naturally strive to learn?

The child’s ability to put himself in other people’s shoes, take on different
perspectives, and distinguish appearance from reality, has deep repercussions
for how he relates to others. Six-year-old children have at their disposal an
amazingly rich palette of ways of relating, plus a great many justifi cations, or
arguments, for why they relate the ways they do.

A 6-year-old can empathise and cooperate and, conversely, she also competes
and requests, criticizes and argues. She will tell you, beyond “because I say
so,” why she thinks what she thinks (“I won’t play with you anymore because
you cheat”) or why she wants what she wants (“I need to drink juice because
it’s good for me”). In other words, she has ideas and opinions that can and
will be exchanged, and she uses these ideas to monitor and optimize her
bonds with others.

The child is learning how to argue, debate, and negotiate—all of which
are part of what it takes to become a playmate, a work-partner, or a team-
player. They develop a personal sense of what makes for appropriate social
behaviour, and they try to “walk the talk.”

More generally, at this age, a child’s urge to become industrious truly sets
in: once rules are set and agreed upon, the child becomes eager and able
to follow them. Many 6-year-olds do so thoroughly, and appreciate it when
they are taken seriously for their seriousness.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Six-year-olds can feel sad or happy when a friend is sad or happy. They can
also distance themselves and hold onto their beliefs. So, for example, a child
may choose to withdraw when bullied by another kid or drop an argument
if someone just doesn’t seem to get it.

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A 6-year-old understands and will tell you that “when you get mad, it doesn’t
do any good to hit—they might hit you back,” or “I was so embarrassed, I
just wanted to disappear” (Smith, 1982).

Children, at this age, become better at negotiating their wants and needs
when cooperating with others, and they try to abide by the rules. By the
same token, many 6-year-olds also develop a sudden urge to compete: They
desire to be the best.

As they reach their seventh birthday, most children begin to internalise a
sense of justice through co-operation and mutual respect, as well as a sense
of pride for their own personal strengths. It will take still more “developmental
time” for the child to further balance his apparently contradictory needs to
cooperate and compete, to take initiative and follow others, and to follow
and break rules.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

At this age, children exhibit fewer “incorrect” emotional responses. They
become better at describing their own feelings and motives—and that
of others—which, in turn, helps them manage their social bonds more
effi ciently. This process can be enhanced through adult intervention,
provided the intervention remains non-intrusive.

The ‘feeling peeling’ game is also relevant here. (See overview of Us at the
beginning of this Part.)

While a small dose of “fair” competition is a healthy counterpoint to
cooperating among peers, at this age, 6-year-olds also need to learn to lose
gracefully and, what is perhaps more important, to win gracefully! Help your
child internalise the benefi ts of co-operation and mutual respect. At the
same time, help her develop a critical mind. In other words, allow her to be
constructive and critical, empathic and detached, caring for others yet proud
of her unique ways and personal strengths. Again, easier said than done!

No child should ever have to hide, or stay alone, if he is insecure, or fear
he is not good at something. Nor should a child be misguided into fearing
criticism, avoiding comparisons with others, or refusing to do what it
takes to get better at something he likes. Cheap appraisal can be worse
than loving criticism. Most children will open up and accept to lose at

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competition games, if the winners are willing to share, not gloat, and show
respect. Adults are key in setting the stage for safe and kind cooperation/
competition.

US – UNDERSTANDING OTHERS
Taking the Perspective of Others. The child is now ready to go at things,
hands on and heads in, and to make her dreams come true. She is also
able to think about events that were previously performed through physical
actions, and to mentally reverse their direction in thought. She can take
on different perspectives. Another characteristic is the understanding that
thoughts are different from actions, and appearances are different from
reality.

The child’s ability to put himself in other people’s shoes, and to take on
different perspectives, has deep repercussions, not just in how he relates
to others, but how he understands other people’s minds, intentions, and
actions.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 6-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Between the ages of six and eight, children build an ever deeper understanding
not just that other people may think differently, but that they often do so
in very particular ways. They become able to identify these differences, to
express them, and gauge them for what they are. What’s more, children at
this age become able to switch between different people’s perspectives, or
viewpoints, and identify in what ways these perspectives differ from each
other.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Children at this age understand and empathise with others: they can feel
sad or happy when a friend is sad or happy. They can also stick to what
they believe, even if others don’t agree, and they may argue with others
about mutual wants and needs. They start to negotiate wants and needs,
and build an inner sense of balance, or justice, through mutual respect and
co-operation

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support or enhance this natural development?

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The ‘feeling peeling’ game is also relevant here. (See overview of Us at the
beginning of this Part.)

World – Making Sense of it All

WORLD – EXPLORING AND INVESTIGATING
Developing Objectivity. As previously mentioned, the seventh year marks
the beginnings of Piaget’s stage of concrete operations. This is a big turning
point. The child now refl ects upon things that were previously acted out, and
draws “logical” conclusions in the head. One manifestation of this newly
acquired competence is that children of this age like to engage in guessing
games, thus moving away from earlier forms of step-by-step explorations.
They also like to trade, collect things, in addition to doing and undoing.

As the attribution of animistic qualities to inanimate objects decreases,
and the thinking becomes less “egocentric” children develop a clearer
understanding of cause and effects, and spatiotemporal events.

Most children, at this age, start to think “objectively” and come up a whole
new set of answers to their habitual questions. Instead of the magical view
of the world (e.g. “A giant made large holes with his footsteps, which were
fi lled by rain and became lakes”), nature is understood through historical
and logical causes (thawing after the Ice Age, movement and melting of
glaciers, etc.).

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 6-year-old naturally strive to learn?

As they reach the stage of concrete operations, children make huge leaps in
their understanding of what makes something else happen (cause and effect),
what comes next in a series of events (temporal ordering), which things are
spatially or topologically close (spatial confi gurations), and what changes or
remains unchanged in a transformation (conservation of substance). All of a
sudden, their understanding moves from magical to logical, from egocentric

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to de-centred or “objective.” The children now have a sense of necessity
that things “ought” to happen in certain ways, and these ways resemble
more how physicists or natural scientists see the world.

Two main characteristics of concrete operations, according to Piaget, are reversibility
and conservation. The 6-year-old’s conception of the world change drastically
as these new forms of thinking set in. The child now understands that space is
reversible (if you go from A to B, you should be able to come back), and begins to
puzzle over why time is irreversible (you can’t get younger; it’s impossible).

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Six-year-olds think logically (in Piaget’s sense) as long as the problem tackled
remains in the realm of their direct experience. They succeed in Piagetian
tasks involving conservation of number and of substance. In Anselmo and
Franz’s words: “Conservation involves the understanding of the constancy
of characteristics such as number, length, mass, or area, despite changes in
appearance. […] all interviews about conservation use the same sequence:
1) establishing equivalent objects, 2) showing some change in appearance of
one of the equivalent objects; 3) asking for another judgement of equivalence;
and 4) asking why the child thinks that way. If a child does not establish initial
equivalence, the interviewer does not proceed (Anselmo and Franz, 1995. p.
483).

The fi rst characteristics to be understood by most children at around six
years of age are number and substance. In everyday life, a child’s ability to
conserve quantities manifests itself in how she feels in tasks involving sharing,
say, of cookies or juice: younger kids will scream if they get 3 cookies instead
of 6 halves of cookies. Older kids won’t fi ght for this because they know the
amounts are the same, even though 6 halves “looks like more.”

As they reach the age of 6, most children start to grapple with the irreversibility
of time in their thinking about aging or death. They come to understand
that, while people (including themselves) grow bigger and older, they rarely
get younger, or shrink! This, again, may be obvious to adults, yet it is not
automatically apparent to young children.

A child’s navigation in space and spatial reasoning evolve a great deal. Most
6-year-olds have a good grasp of topological relations, such as inside/outside,
below, on top, neighbouring, and they start to think of space as a container.

204

Six-year-olds like to play with pattern blocks and other construction materials
that enable them to explore spatial relations.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?
At this age, it is useful to imagine fun games in which children can actively
explore aspects of cause-and effect, temporal order or orientation, and
spatial confi gurations.

Shape and space: Explore topological and geometric relations such as
boundaries, vicinities. Look at spatial arrangements and positions.

Imagine games that involve 1) placing objects or people in different
positions (over, under, above, below, between); or distance (near, far);
tell others to do so; 2) exploring topological space (inside/outside) and 3)
playing with Euclidean shape (squares, triangles, and other rigid shapes,).
Example: build /superpose / compare and play with pattern blocks.

Ordering:
Arranging elements in a sequence. Building a chain or train of elements…

Imagine games that involve the following activities: Playing with temporal or
spatial order (before after, behind in-front). Example: Build necklaces with
beads, trains and chains of elements, say from small to big, from light to
dark, etc…

WORLD – SEEKING LOGIC
Part of a Larger Logic. The seventh year is a breakthrough in a child’s
logical thinking, which has deep consequences in how children think
about numbers. This being said, the development of logic is not limited
to numerical thinking. One of the characteristics of concrete operations
is reversibility: the ability to mentally reverse the direction of thought
and action. So, for example, the child learns that something that can be
added can also be subtracted. Another characteristic is transitivity: the
idea that if A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, then A must be
bigger than C.

Six-year-olds develop the logical knowledge needed to solve number
problems and to be able to measure continuous quantities, i.e. measure
things, using a go-between. This go-between, what’s more, can be a
small unit to be re-positioned along a line and, at each step, keeping

205

track of where the previous end was located and starting anew from
there.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 6-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Concrete operational thinkers are able to reason logically as long as the
problems tackled are within the realm of their direct experience. That is why
this type of reasoning is called concrete.

Six-year-olds begin to understand what numbers stand for, and they use
numbers as a means to compare amounts of discrete as well as continuous
quantities. An example of a continuous quantity is the length of a table. An
example of a discrete quantity is the amount of eggs in a basket. Evaluating
continuous quantities requires measuring. Evaluating discrete quantities
requires counting.

At this age, children begin to understand the ordinal and the cardinal
aspects of number. In their measuring strategies, they can use units that
are smaller than the total length to be measured (though this is still hard),
provided that they have more than one unit at their disposal. The child
will align units along the length to be measured, and then count the
total.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Like 5-year-olds, 6-year-olds like to experiment with shapes and space.
They enjoy “measuring things” by comparing them one-to-one or using their
footsteps, and they start to count things using their fi ngers. Six year-olds
like to play with pattern blocks, and they become intrigued by the “logic”
inherent to Russian dolls, Cuisenaire rods, or Dienes blocks —all meant to
embody aspects of the number series.

Again, math is more than counting, and logic is more than tables of truths,
logical formulas, or propositions. To Papert, exploring mathematical ideas,
at an early age, cannot be about applying a set of rules to a set of numbers
to get a set of answers [Papert, 1993).

206

There are many ways in which children enjoy thinking logically. Continue to
encourage activities “beyond counting” where children can playfully engage in
comparing, classifying, ordering, and patterning things (see previous section).
In addition, at this age, many children begin to enjoy activities that involve:

Measuring using footsteps, or width of extended palm and deciding how
long or how much (length, weight, volume, or other continuous quantities).
Measuring can be done through direct comparison or indirectly, using a third
element as a measuring tool. The measuring unit can be bigger or smaller
than the quantities to be compared. Example: Place objects side by side, use
a stick or string to compare lengths. Use footsteps

Counting without numbers and playing with numbers to learn to count:
Experience numbers as labels. Experience the cardinal property of number
(how many). Experience the ordinal property of number (fi rst, second, third).
Counting as in reciting numerals in order. PLUS- Attaching a numeral name to
a series of objects (Note: Numerals are symbols for numbers which should be
introduced after / following an understanding of the cardinality of a set.).

In all cases, it is important to pay more attention to what children are thinking
about, and not what is literally correct. The best way to allow children to
think logically on their own, is not to ask them to mimic expert’s logicians.
Instead, teachers and parents can play an important role in cultivating
children’s own logical thinking by proposing many exciting activities that
involve mathematically rich ideas (Kamii, 1982, Papert, 1980).

Creations – Realising Visions

CREATIONS – IMAGINING
From Pretence to Intellectually Challenging Play. From pretend play to clever joking
and teasing, from senseless incongruity to appreciating word puns, this is a year of
big transition due to the child’s entry in the “concrete operational stage,” as defi ned
by (Piaget, 1950) (see section on World). At this age, children begin to pay closer
attention to “hidden” relations beyond appearances, and they understand that words
can have double meanings. A child’s ability to think more logically in turn helps her
understand and appreciate the “logical displacements” that make both fantasy play
and humour possible. Word games and riddles, in particular, thrive, at this age.

207

To a six-year-old, symbolic play takes the form of acting in plays, casting
puppet shows, reciting riddles, and learning to write poetry and prose.
Unlike 5-year-olds, 6-year-olds begin to prefer games that involve mental
exercise in the place of acting out stories through make-believe. This being
said, a six-year-old’s capacity for imagination and play continues, it is not
abandoned. Video or computer games often become appealing at this age.
And so are games with rules, such as board games or card games.

Six-year-olds’ sense of humour changes as they realize that words can have
ambiguous meanings—a necessary condition for understanding the jokes of
older children and adults. It is during this age that many children transition
between stage 3 and stage 4 humour, as defi ned by McGhee (McGhee,
1984). That’s also when some children begin to enjoy simple riddles and
knock-knock jokes, such as: “Knock knock / Who’s there? / Lettuce / Lettuce
who? / Lettuce in. It’s cold out here!”

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Pretend play as we know it goes somewhat underground at this age and play
“with rules” takes centre stage. Children do not talk out or enact their make
believe-games. Instead, they enjoy the challenge of games involving mental
exercises, or discipline. “Hard fun” to use Seymour Papert’s term once again
(Papert 1993) is the name of the game at this age.

As they gravitate toward their seventh birthday, many children begin to
enjoy video games, computer games, and electronic toys, though this
passion will further increase in the eighth and ninth years. These games
and toys become the digital playgrounds for children in these age groups.
While some children begin to like to move through the complexities and
different levels of a video or board games, 6-year-olds may still try to bend
the rules.

From enjoying “pure incongruity”, or nonsensical incongruity, six-year-
olds move to appreciating “conceptual incongruities” for their consistent
yet unexpected resolutions within an absurd context. This being said,
when they make up their own riddles, the answer still often tends to be
either realistic or nonsensical. Initially, that is, the child seems to view
riddles as puzzling questions with arbitrary answers. The answers are
not really arbitrary, of course, but seem to be to the child who cannot
discriminate between the joking and the non-joking answer. For example,

208

to the question: “Why would you always wear a watch in the desert?
The answer is: because it has springs in it” (McGhee, 1984.p. 132). The
child interprets the absurdity of the answer to be the joke and does
not understand that double meaning of the word “spring,” which is the
essence of the joke.

Wolfenstein noted that, at about 6 years of age, many children begin to
feel the need for a joke façade (Freud’s stage 3) to disguise aggressive, and
otherwise taboo nature of their jokes. While four-year-olds take great delight
in calling someone “pee pee” or “kaa kaa”, a six-year old probably will not.
The child has at his disposal more sophisticated tricks to be a good jester and
his teasing goes beyond mere name calling.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

At this age, adults usually fi nd it easier to engage with the more “rationally playful”
six-year-old. Play various board games or card games with your children. Share
riddles, or get a book of riddles from the library (there are many) geared to this
age level. The child will appreciate a good challenge, but she may be upset if she
loses all the time. She may insist that all others abide by the rules, but may bend
them a bit (or a lot) when it benefi ts her own standing in the game!

CREATIONS – ENACTING AND CREATING
Draw What You See. Write Down the Spoken Word! The seventh year marks a
major breakthrough in a child’s creative expression, due to his access to concrete
operational forms of thinking, as defi ned by Piaget (Piaget, 1951). Seven-year-
olds fi nd greater pleasure in language games, such as tongue twisters, secret
codes, riddles, and rhymes. In their play acts and written productions, they now
seek precision and logical consistency, and pay closer attention to audiences,
fi ctional or real, to whom they address their creations. Earlier forms of pretend-
and role-play fi nd new expression through music, poetry, and drama.

Starting at age 6, children’s drawings become more detailed and
representational. The child now likes to draw what she sees! In their writing,
many children of this age move from writing single words, like their names,
and copying letters and words, to jotting down what they hear in the form
of “invented spelling.”

While “invented spelling”, an early form of speech written down, is often
hard to decipher by an untrained adult, it constitutes a legitimate stage in

209

a child’s learning to write. It is also a good-enough convention, as long
as understood by peer readers. Only when a child becomes genuinely
interested in addressing his messages to wider audiences will he genuinely
be interested and eager to spell correctly i.e. understand the usefulness of
conventions.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 6-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Six-year-olds like to engage in conversations, and are willing and able
to exchange ideas and opinions. Both in their play acts and in ordinary
conversations, children of this age are increasingly aware of their audiences,
and they change their tone and infl ection when feeling angry, sad, disgusted,
or happy or, when play-acting, as if they felt angry, sad, disgusted or happy.
Children of this age also regulate the content and level of complexity of their
speech when talking to younger children.

What is true of spoken language and performance is also true of a child’s
written productions. Six-year-olds like to improve their drawings to integrate
“point of view”. The child, in other words, likes to draw what she sees and
not just what she knows or imagines. Often interpreted by adults as a lack
of genuine creativity, this new obsession with point of view just marks a new
phase in the child’s growing creative expression

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

As they enter the fi rst grade, most six-year-olds can print their fi rst and last
name, and they now copy a diamond shape, and write the numerals from 1 to
19. The child also uses his newly acquired literacy skills to record his ideas in
stories and to do arithmetic computations. His drawings become more detailed
and representational (Anselmo and Franz, 1995. p.393), and their writings start
to mean something, as they attempt to capture what’s being said.

Six-year-old children are fairly good at communicating their thoughts about a
book they have read, or a TV show they have seen, especially if the book or
show in question is familiar to all involved i.e. constitutes a common reference.
Children of this age like to discuss character’s traits, motives, and plots.

Silent reading begins to play a more important role as the child learns to
master the phonetics and encoding features of words, and the child’s written

210

messages move away from mock writing to the “real” writing down of
spoken language, often resulting in invented spelling. Attempts at capturing
point(s) of view and the third dimension of things in drawings leads to very
interesting “errors”, or intelligent creative compromises, not unlike the ones
we admire in many paintings by Italian Masters, like Giotto, in the early
Renaissance!

Children in this age group, needless to say, still like to play-act and to dress
up in costumes. Yet, their plots and plays become more sophisticated,
consistent, and social; more dialogue than monologue.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

As the child approaches his seventh birthday, he may like to use a simple word
processor in addition to handwriting. This tendency will likely grow during
and after his seventh year. In effect, unlike the word cast on paper, a digital
text is easily confi gurable, which has as a fortunate effect to break down the
classical reader-writer distinction in dramatic ways. Readers/writers can add,
delete, incorporate text and images as part of text, re-edit, and rearrange
paragraphs. Digital texts, in a sense, are built like a patchwork or montage:
You don’t need to start from scratch but you can assemble existing pieces
and bits. As Lanham put it: “the interactive reader of the electronic world
incarnates the responsive reader of whom we make so much” (Lanham,
1993). This quality may be appreciated by youngsters who like to think of
creative expression as “found art,” or as the progressive adaptation or the
“massaging” of other people’s ideas until they become one’s own!

Digital texts also allow for simultaneous processing of words and images,
which can help children express themselves in their own hundred languages,
thus allowing new genres of writing to emerge. Writing in the digital age
becomes informal, multi-authored, multi-threaded.

By allowing the incorporation of multiple voices, cyber-writing can re-install
the possibility for multi-logues. This being said, digital technology alone is
no warranty for enhancing young children’s creative/critical reading, writing,
thinking. It can only provide new occasions for exploring the bumpy road
leading from spoken and written language, and bridging the gap between text
and context, author and audience, words, images and sounds, in new ways.

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Part 4.: Early School Years by age Year

7-8 Years
Me – Being Me

ME – USING MY BODY
Skate and Swim, Swing and Ski. Most 7-8 year old children are increasingly
skilled at manoeuvring bikes and at using adult tools, such as hammers,
saws, rakes, and shovels. Their ability to control movements in time and
space, and in sync with others, reaches a new peak, which in turn, opens the
ways to new passions: the child is now ready, and eager, to learn to swim and
to skate, and she loves to participate in all kinds of group activities, such as
sports, gymnastics, or dance. She does so with competency, understanding,
and delight.

COMPETENCIES:
What does a 7–8-year-old naturally strive to learn?

In the eighth year, a child’s physical-motor skills reach new levels of
refi nement. So does his sense of balance, perceptuo-motors skills, eye-hand
coordination, and body awareness. The child now more easily guides his
body movements, using both perception (external visible or tangible clues)
and proprio-ception (internal body image). Eye-hand coordination improves
even further.

In sum, as they reach their eighth birthday, most children can master their
body movements in time and space, and with others, including so called
lateralization, or left-right coordination. To do so, they use visual, auditory,
and tactile-kinaesthetic clues.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

The child’s gross motor skills have improved constantly but signifi cantly
since her fourth birthday. Sport-specifi c skills are now a part of most of the
games and activities in which she participates (Butterfi eld and Loovis, 1993).
Children, at this age, like to meet friends for skating, roller-blading, swimming,
dancing, and playing music. Some children begin to join organized leagues
of team sports.

212

Simultaneously, the end of early school years also marks the consolidation
and further rapid development of fi ne-motor skills. Sewing and knitting
become possible. Arts and crafts are greatly enjoyed. Tying shoelaces is
no longer a problem. At school, the child now begins to write in cursive
script. His drawings become schematic, and attention to design, balance,
and perspective increase.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

Again, imitation games as well as improvisational games are most effective
here.

One useful way to help children understand the difference between
improvisation and accompaniment, or “going solo” and following, is to let
them switch roles as they play in a band, sing, beat drums, or dance. Let your
child be the director, or choreographer, then be the solo player or dancer,
and then disappear in the background and join in the chorus, or orchestra,
to keep the beat for others.

ME – KNOWING MYSELF
Forming a Personal Identity. Researchers generally agree that a major
shift in self-concept occurs as children approach their eighth birthday.
That’s when their awareness of the psychological self becomes more
fully developed. That’s also when children begin to show an interest in
comparing themselves with others. They often do so spontaneously, as
in “I ride my bike better than my little brother. Yet, my dad is better than
me, and that’s OK”. Related, children at this age are now less sensitive to
criticism and they won’t mind as much to stand out as different or odd.
This state of grace usually lasts until the child reaches puberty, in the
early teens.

Seven- to eight-year-olds’ self-control has greatly improved, although there
still can be isolated outbursts of anger or withdrawal when upset—such
behaviour is not unique to childhood!

The seven-year-old is less selfi sh than she was formerly, but far more self-
absorbed. Children of this age tend to withdraw into themselves. It is as
though they are building up a sense of self that will burst out a year later at
age eight. The seven-year-old may appear sullen or quiet compared to the
past few boisterous years.

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According to Ames and Haber, the child’s experience of confl ict undergoes
a change at this age. “While confl ict at six tends to be chiefl y with Mother
and over things he is supposed to do or not do, confl ict now is more within
himself, over accomplishments, ability, performance, living up to his own
standards” (Ames and Haber, 1985).

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 7–8-year-old naturally strive to learn?

7-8 years olds start to develop sense of self, or personal identity, in the light
of the areas that they dream of excelling in. So, for example, a child may see
herself as an athlete, a bright student, an actor, a debater, or even a clown,
and as she does so, she wants to be recognized and respected for this. Many
children start to carve out a niche for themselves, in their idealized role, at
school. Seven- to eight-year-olds can tell you more concretely what they are
interested in, revealing a greater self-awareness of their likes, dislikes, and
interests.

Like their younger counter-parts, 7-8 years olds still do not like to be too
different from others in dress, hairstyle, or manner of talking. Yet, they are
less sensitive, provided they “fi t” into their own chosen category (say, as a
cool or bright kid).

At this age, children also become increasingly able to evaluate their own
performance in the light of what others think and do. They become better
negotiators in cooperating with others, and better losers in competition.
Fairness and cheating become important to 7-year-olds. They try to
understand the rules and abide by them, and they become indignant when
others do not.

At this age, the child’s moral sense is governed less by what is forbidden by
her parents and more by what he holds to be right or wrong. The 7–8-year
old thus begins to develop a sense of conscience.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

A 7–8-year-old may express a desire for greater privacy and may ask for
her own room or space apart from other siblings. Yet at the same time, she
wants to know where she stands in relation to others. She wants to know
what she’s good at, and what she’s not so good at, though she tries hard to

214

improve her skills. Indeed, seven- to eight-year-olds often show remarkable
perseverance when it comes to perfecting their skills. A child of this age will
spend hours throwing a ball against a wall, trying to aim it at a certain spot.
She will play hours of hopscotch, basketball, jump-rope, Frisbee, or other
activities that test her skill and accuracy. Her emerging sense of self needs
to see that such skills are improvable, if not perfectible.

Her ability to appreciate different perspectives will manifest itself as a
willingness to listen to someone else’s side of the story, for example, in a
dispute. She can understand how someone else’s feelings might differ from
her own.

SUPPORT:
What can caregivers do to support this natural development?

Give the child the space and privacy he needs and demands at this age, yet
maintain connection with him.

Don’t let your child’s comparisons with others become invidious or
debilitating. Stress the improvability of skills and differences among people,
and that difference doesn’t imply inferiority.

Us – Growing Together

US – RELATING TO OTHERS
Balancing Me and Us. In the eighth year, children further develop and
consolidate their co-operative skills while preserving their identity through a
growing sense of “industry.” Achieving a balance between such apparently
confl icting urges as “do what’s good for you” and “be good to others”
remains a challenge, even at this age. So, for example, 7-year-olds still have
to learn to “say what they think” or share their emotions to avoid the stress of
“bottling up” in ways that do not jeopardize interpersonal relations.

Putting one’s understanding of human emotions at the service of pro-
social behaviour is no easy task, even for adults. Yet, doing so successfully
enables the child to carve a comfortable niche among others: one based
on negotiation, mutual respect, and individual thriving. Seven-year-olds still
have to deal with the fact that doing “what feels best” sometimes limits or
hurts others. As they reach their eighth birthday, they become increasingly
good at fi nding ways out of this dilemma.

215

COMPETENCIES:
What does a 7-year-old naturally strive to learn?

At this age, children understand and empathise with others, and they also
argue with others and criticize them for doing or thinking things they don’t
like. In other words, they bond and belong. Yet, they also stand behind their
beliefs, at the cost of being “on their own.” Many 7-year-olds start to master
the art of creating win-win situations. In other words, they have become
competent social partners, and they carve their own role when cooperating
with others.

This being said, children of this age, can also still be cruel at times, and point
out children who are different as their “enemies.” Intuitively we know it: the
smarter a person gets, of whatever age, the more sophisticatedly loving or
cruel they can be. That’s where a child’s ability to build an inner sense of
social justice, through cooperation and mutual respect, becomes key, and
where the best thing adults can do is to serve as role models.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Seven-year-olds begin to have idols they identify with. They also fi nd a best
friend and they tend to stick with that friend for a longer period of time than
they did in earlier age groups.

By the time they reach their eighth birthday, most children are eager, beyond
negotiating mutual wants and needs, to sustain friendships over time and
across context. They begin to enjoy talking over the phone with friends, and
using cell-phones or computers to communicate (this tendency will increase
at age 9). They also like to belong to a league or group like scouts. Many girls
take pleasure in keeping a diary.

Some children still show occasional aggressive behaviours at this age, which
is normal. However, if antisocial behavioural patterns persist, they should be
taken seriously. The child may need help to outgrow them.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support or enhance this natural development?

During school years, a child’s relational / emotional maturity, pro-social behaviour,
and inner sense of social justice can be enhanced by adult encouragement.

216

Help your child express and communicate her feelings, and create a safe
context to discuss the consequences of certain emotional reactions to / from
other people, and on self. Imagine scenarios, based on the work by Smith
(see previous age year) that can be played out in the realm of make-believe.
Again, do not pressure any child to disclose her feelings if she doesn’t want
to. In addition to Smith’s “peeling feelings” types of games, Damon (1977,
1980) developed hypothetical stories and presented them to children from
the ages 4 to 12 to study their social reasoning. Similar stories, involving
moral paradoxes, can be imagined and used for educational purposes.

Most adults are concerned about the expression of aggression and other
negative feelings in children. Yet, adults don’t always do what’s best to
encourage youngsters’ expression of positive or pro-social behaviours,
including co-operation and altruism. A fi rst rule, when it comes to teaching
positive feelings and pro-social behaviours is, again, be a role model. Care,
understanding and consistency, more than moralistic talk, will be more likely
to have an impact. Children are very sensitive to hypocrisy and are experts at
imitating adults in what they do, and not what they say. Research on children’s
altruism shows that the single most important factor in encouraging altruistic
behaviour in children is the presence of a role model who is herself altruistic
and who expresses genuine pleasure in doing so (Shaffer, 1988).

US – UNDERSTANDING OTHERS
Coming to Understand the Psychology of Others. In the eighth year, the child’s
self-and-other knowledge includes an awareness of many psychological
components, such as needs, beliefs, and values, as they change over time,
across context while, at the same time, retaining some consistency within a
person.

While this is huge progress, the child, at this age, still assumes that
psychological and physical realities are, or should be, consistent. In other
words, it is hard to understand, for a 7-year-old, that someone may not feel
the same as they do, or not think what they say. Psychological “reality” is
inferred from what’s being expressed by a person (i.e. her behaviours) and
not what’s being intended, or thought, or repressed (i.e. his mental states).

As they reach their eighth birthday, children cease to be “naïve behaviourists”
and come to appreciate the importance of inner states and subjective
perceptions in defi ning external realities. In other words, we can only
understand others, and the world, through the lens of our own understanding.
Understanding this is no trivial pursuit!

217

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 7-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Most researchers agree that a big breakthrough in both self- and
other-awareness occurs around the age of eight when a person’s
psychological self is seen as being distinct from its physical and
behavioural manifestations. This, in turn, requires an understanding
that, when it comes to understanding others, what you see is NOT what
you get.

Most 7-year-olds still believe that “reality”, psychological or otherwise,
is an absolute thing associated with physical, concrete objects that
can be known directly. Children think of their minds as a part of their
physical body. They have little sense of the “reality” of human feelings,
needs, personality i.e. no understanding that thoughts may be produced
in a specific part of the brain, or body. They also have poor concept of
what happens inside their or other people’s bodies.

As they reach their eighth birthday, children begin to understand the
importance of perception in providing information about “reality”—
psychological or otherwise. They strongly believe that what you know
is whatever you can see, hear, touch, etc. To them, all people have a
brain, and thoughts and images come from the brain or mind.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Children of this age are well aware of other people’s needs, and they will
be able to apply their own awareness of such feelings to sympathise in the
true sense of the term. For example: say a child knows her friend’s strong
desire for a toy and disappointment at losing it. If the child then takes the
toy away from her friend, she is able to address her friends’ feelings (i.e.
she knows she has caused her friend’s sadness) and, in the light of this, will
most likely give it back to her…against her own desire to keep it. In other
words, the child is able to project her understanding of her own emotional
/ psychological states onto others.

Seven-year-olds become able to compare themselves with others, and
to acknowledge that others may be better, or different, and how. They
also respond to questions about others in relative terms: he is better
than me at running, and that annoys me.

218

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

Moral paradoxes, and puzzling scenarios for role playing games are very
relevant at this age. The same goes for “feeling peeling” types of games
(Smith), or anything that enables the child to understand others, and to take
on their perspective and, beyond that, that helps the child to move in and
out of a different perspective, and do so in varying contexts.

A more general rule of thumb, especially for families: 1. spend quality time
together, 2. communicate your feelings, 3. show appreciation and support
for each other 4. build a common sense of purpose and values, 5. show
commitment, even at the worst of times (Stinnett, Sanders, and DeFrain,
1981). Obviously, there are as many different styles of parenting as there are
parents. In all cases, the art of education consists of helping the child fi nd
a balance between self-assertiveness and conformity with group standards.
To do so, parents should be neither too authoritative nor too permissive
(Baumrind, 1977).

World – Making Sense of it All

WORLD – EXPLORING AND INVESTIGATING
Developing Flexibility & Perspective. Seven-year-old children mainly
consolidate the large gains they have acquired in their previous year. Most
7-year-olds succeed in more complex classical Piagetian tasks, such as the
classical “conservation” of areas and weight. The children’s thinking at this
age is, generally speaking, more objective, and animism as well as magical
thinking, while still used a great deal in play, are no longer dominant as the
child explains how the world works. In other words, the child does not lose his
imaginative-poetic ways to scientifi c rationality. Instead, he becomes better at
knowing in which circumstances what forms of thinking are most effective.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 7-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Seven-year-olds’ manners of inquiry, ways of thinking, and worldviews are
increasingly fl exible as they become better at taking on different perspectives.
They are able to change variables in a situation with some rigour and logic,
as they better understand the contexts in which certain solutions need to be
found.

219

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Experiments by Jacques Montangero and by Francisco Pons, indicate that
children up to 8 years old tend to describe changes as a quantitative increase
of one variable, whereas at age 11-12 they can handle the growth / co-
evolution of different variables.

Conservation: Many seven year-olds begin to conserve lengths, weights,
and areas. As mentioned in the previous section, all interviews about
conservation use the same sequence. Their ease with understanding
conservation manifests itself increasingly in everyday life: they are rarely
“fooled” by false appearances of “more.”

Children of this age like to play boards games, chess, video and computer
games, and some children become great collectors: they like to trade
cards.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

Sigel and Cocking’s “distancing” activities can be relevant at this age. The idea
here is to help children observe things carefully and use language (and other
means of description) to shape and sharpen their understanding of things
(Sigel and Cocking, 1977). So, for example: a child may be encouraged to
observe things carefully: (“watch what it’s doing”), to describe and interpret
things in her own words: (“what’s this?” ; “how does it feel/work/appear”;
what does it mean?). The child may also be encouraged to demonstrate what
she means and explain what she thinks (show and tell).

At this age, children enjoy very much going to Children’s and Science
museums. They like to vary observations by looking at things through
magnifying glasses, from microscopes to telescopes. They become interested
in the otherwise “invisible” qualities of objects, and they love to change their
stance, perspective, or lens to unveil different layers of “otherwise invisible
things.”

WORLD – SEEKING LOGIC
Consolidation of “Know-how” and “Know-when”. In the eighth year,
concrete-operational children are consolidating the potential acquired
during the previous year, which involves both grounding and increased

220

fl exibility. In effect, while 7-year-olds’ thinking is generally more objective,
logical, and abstract, it also becomes increasingly grounded, fl exible, and
more situated. Children, at this age, know when it is best to think logically,
or poetically, or ethically when dealing with different situations. More to
the point, they know under which circumstances a given logical reasoning
applies or breaks down.

As an example, seven-year-olds generally understand the nature of transitive
relations. (If A is smaller than B, and B is smaller than C, then A ought to be smaller
than C.) They will tell you that “it has to be that way”, that “they know even if they
haven’t seen A and C together.” At the same time, 7-year-olds also know when
transitivity should NOT be used: They will NOT infer, like younger children do,
that “if Ari knows Bonnie, and Bonnie knows Mike; Ari ought to know Mike”.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 7-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Philosophical and ethical questions raised by children in the early school years
have the potential of helping them think independently, logically, and critically.
Philosophical thinking involves questioning fundamental assumptions. It helps
children carry through an argument, or reasoning, and draw valid inferences.
It also helps them build a rationale or reasons for their beliefs, and understand
that not any rationale goes! Ethical questions raised by children help them
understand under when logic alone won’t do! The logic used to deceive or
confound may be different from the logic used to convince or critique!

Children at this age can measure the length of objects using measuring units
that are smaller than the units to be compared: the children align the units and
they understand that the length that has more units is longer. Children also
begin to understand particular cases like: twice as big (if one element needs
2 units and another one), or three times as big (one against 3). Quantities like
two thirds are still a problem,

Children at this age can add and subtract. Many start to understand simple
multiplications. Fractions are still problematic.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

With only a little encouragement from adults, 7-year-olds engage in hand and
fi nger play involving counting, adding, and subtracting. A child’s two hands,

221

each with its fi ve fi ngers, is a youngster’s fi rst mobile calculator. Children of this
age also like to exchange and distribute tokens, M&Ms, or toys and, in doing so,
they develop their own sense of when they, or their dolls, get their fair share.

Equally intriguing to children is the idea of measuring by arm’s spread or
footsteps. For example, children can be encouraged to use their own footsteps
to mark out several equal areas for block building. Obviously, children do
not measure precisely, they may take longer and shorter steps, but they will
understand the concept of counting off distance using part of their body.

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support or enhance this natural development?

At this age, continue to imagine activities that involve both measuring and
counting. In addition, always remember that thinking logically goes beyond
numbers and sets. Use philosophical thinking and moral paradoxes as a way to
ground logic in contexts. Help the child become an “epistemologist” beyond
a logician or mathematician. An epistemologist is someone who knows what
kinds of thinking, logic, knowledge, and techniques for validating knowledge
are better suited to which kinds of endeavours or situations than others.

• Measuring: Beyond direct comparison, or body-centred “footsteps”
encourage measuring using a measuring “unit”. Measuring unit can be
bigger or smaller than the quantities to be compared. Example: Place objects
side by side, use a stick or string to compare lengths. Use footsteps.

• Counting: Beyond counting-and-pointing, allow children to explore the

ordinal and cardinal properties of number. Note: Numerals are symbols for
numbers which should be introduced after / following an understanding of
the cardinality of a set.

Additionally, at this age, children may also enjoy activities that involve
organizing, representing, and recording mathematical information.
– Building and controlling graphs.
– Drawing and building models.
– Creating one’s own invented representations to quantify things.
– Giving instructions to other children on how to achieve some goal.
– Simple programming activities. Example: Papert’s “Turtle

geometry” is based on a body-centred notion of geometry that is
conveyed to a robot or virtual “turtle” that draws on paper or on
a computer screen. (Papert 1980, Abelson and di Sessa, 1984)

222

Last but not least, discussing philosophical issues helps children learn to
distinguish between the factuality of a statement, and different subjective
takes (Strichartz and Burton,1990; Lipman, 1984). Matthew Lipman’s
contribution to children’s philosophical education during the early school
years is signifi cant. The Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for
Children (Montclair State College, Upper Montclair, NJ), under the direction
of Matthew Lipman, has developed educational activities for developing
philosophical thinking. Lipman’s books include: Rio and Gus, 1982; Pixie,
1981; and Philosophy for Children, 1984.

Creations – Realising Visions

CREATIONS – IMAGINING
Seven-year-olds spend much of their time refi ning and expanding what they
have learned during the previous year. Here again, hard fun is the name of
the game at this age, and word games and riddles continue to thrive.

Early forms of pretence, as played by younger children, now take on the forms
of acting in plays, setting up puppet shows, writing poetry, prose, or playing
video games and Pokemon with peers. Video or computer games become
appealing to 7-year-olds who, more than their younger counterparts, are willing
and able to move through the complexities and different levels, as a means of
self-improvement. Seven-year-olds also become more interested in, and good
at, commercial board games and checkers, and perhaps later, chess.

At this age, children’s humour changes in the sense that the child is no longer
satisfi ed with producing incongruity for the sake of incongruity. Instead,
the resolution of incongruity, in a joke-like fashion, becomes a key element
to foster amusement. This, in turn, contributes to a better understanding of
riddles in which a puzzling question calls for an answer made arbitrary by
the fact that a person was expecting to react to meaning A and was given
meaning B, but made systematic by the fact that meaning A and B share
another systematic relation (Sutton-Smith, 1975). Examples of riddles include:
“Why did the cookie cry? Because its mother was a wafer so long.”

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 7-year-old naturally strive to learn?

Symbolic Play: The most popular forms of play, at this age, require a great
deal mental exercise, or discipline (they are challenging) while at the same

223

time, occurring in a fantasy context (they comprise a fi ctional element). To a
7-year-old, video games and digital toys often become a favourite playground
for “hard fun’ because they allow for self-improvement within a virtual context
of escalating levels of complexity, challenge, and diffi culty. Like earlier forms
of pretend play, they enable the child to play out some of his feelings and
ideas on a make-believe ground. Like theatre, they constitute a virtual world or
make-believe stage in which risks can be taken without consequences.

Humour: When fi rst and second graders make up their own riddles, the
answer still often tends to be either realistic or nonsensical. Initially, that is,
the child seems to view riddles as puzzling questions with arbitrary answers.
The answers are not really arbitrary, of course, but seem to be to the child
who cannot discriminate between the joking and the non-joking answer,
which calls for a greater degree of linguistic sophistication than the child can
muster at this point.

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Children of this age become more willing and able to adhere to the rules of
a game, whether the rules are self-established, as in open-ended games, or
dictated by a game, as in video games or checkers. Provided the child likes
the game she is playing, she won’t bend rules anymore but she will stick to
them faithfully. Again, hard fun is the name of the games, at this age!

This is the age par excellence of glory of word games and riddles. In McGhee’s
words: “By the age of seven or eight, most children have become aware of
the fact that many words are ambiguous in meaning and that this ambiguity
creates a whole new world of possibilities for humour. This sets the stage
for the elementary-school child’s favourite form of humour—the riddle […]
One of the interesting features of the early enjoyment of riddles is that many
children begin to memorize and recite them before they fully understand
them” (McGhee, 1984, p.132.)

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

Help the child express his most daring thoughts “in a hundred languages”
(see next section). And help him convey what he means, or wants to tell, in
a language and form that is creative yet understandable and acceptable by
others.

224

Children this age like to be challenged. They love to fi gure things out. Word-
oriented games like ‘Scrabble’, ‘Fictionary’, and simple crossword puzzles
allow a child to exercise her newly developed mental/linguistic reasoning
abilities. Many of these games can be played successfully without being
competitive (e.g. without keeping score). The focus can then be placed on
the joy of creating clever solutions.

CREATIONS – ENACTING AND CREATING
Becoming a designer! Signifi cant changes mark a child’s creative expressions,
both written and oral, during her early school years. A general trend, manifest
in a 7-year-old’s drawings, writings, and musical notations, is a move away
from early forms of fanciful fi gurations toward more cultivated, logically
consistent, and more conventional expressive forms. The child now takes
the time to work on and refi ne her spontaneous expressions. She becomes
a designer!

While less imaginative in appearance, these more realistic-looking
productions should not be seen as a drop in a child’s imagination! Instead,
the child’s focus is shifting. He now fi ne tunes his productions to satisfy
multiple points of view, and he seeks to integrate new dimensions. The child
also crafts his expressions to fi t her audiences, as well as their own point of
view. He addresses his artwork.

In sum, beyond speaking her mind spontaneously in a hundred languages,
most seven-year-old children seek consistency, often within a medium,
and external transparency as criteria for success in the realization of their
fantasies. They want their artwork to be well crafted and understood by
those she cares about. They want it to be neat!

Once this industrious / laborious phase has passed (Erikson, Piaget), the child
will be ready again to unleash his creative mind. But, this time around, his
creative leaps will be even more expressive and mature. It is through cycles
of inspiration and “transpiration” (i.e. hard fun) that a child’s imagination
gives rise to creative artistic expression. Again, exact ages are not the point
here.

COMPETENCIES:
What does the 7-year-old naturally strive to learn?

As they reach their eighth birthday, most young creators have learned to
express themselves through enactments such as painting and drawing,

225

dance and music, to name just a few possibilities. They have become fairly
good “designers” and crafts-persons, and their repertoires-of-realization
for expressing and communicating thoughts and feelings, oral, written, and
artistic, are richer, more elegant, and more social.

Seven-year-olds like to express and communicate their thoughts, be it about
a book they have read or a TV show they have seen, and they spend much
time discussing character traits, motives, and plots.

Seven-year-olds also like to draw, write, and perform: they do all of the
above in very mindful and sophisticated ways:

Silent reading starts to play an important role as the child learns to master the
phonetics and encoding features of words. The child’s drawing and writings
further improve, and so do her abilities to capture music and movement,
using invented symbol systems to indicate the musical features of a song or
rhythm, or to give other people directions on how to move about in space
and reach destinations such as their house or the school.

When asked to write down a song they know “so that someone else can sing
it,” children of this age, even untrained in music, will invent amazingly rich and
articulate representations of the songs they know, featuring rhythm and pitch,
which they combine in a simple phrases using all kinds of signs and symbols.
Their musical notations reveal deep understanding of music (Bamberger,
1992).

MANIFESTATION:
What actions will the child do to attain the competencies?

Musical pitch emerges as a primary component of children’s musical
development by the age of seven (Davidson and Scripp, 1988), and in their
spontaneous musical notations, seven-year-olds represent both rhythmic
groupings and the melodic contour of a song (using, say, strokes and dashes
to indicate rhythmic groupings and writing the words of a song in a downward
or upward slope (like a mountain) to mark the melodic contour.

Many children of this age begin to enjoy giving oral presentations, and demos,
of topics at school, or in debates. They use language, and other media of
expression, rather profi ciently. Others, shyer of performing in front of many
people, feel more comfortable performing their show- and-tell before family
members, such as parents and siblings.

226

In their play, they love to play creatively with language using words games,
riddles, and songs.

Other skills include the abilities to:

– Represent others and the world around them through words and through
non-verbal forms of communication, such as dance, music, art, facial
expressions.

– Use expressive language: ideas well presented, verbally and otherwise.

– Listen or use receptive language skills: understanding and following
directions (from Dorothy Singer’s relevance grid 6-14)

SUPPORT:
What can care-givers do to support this natural development?

Play environments that allow for creative and critical literacy activities, in
a broad sense, are important at this age. In addition to teaching children
literacy in the narrow sense, take the time to cultivate their creative and
critical mind through arts and through staging and/or discussing multi-media
performances. Look at TV shows and theatrical performances with your
children, and engage them in reading pieces to be discussed in groups. Play
and discuss their favourite video games with them. Teach them to make
things and speak out while, at the same time, cultivating their critical mind.

Challenge students to reason with images instead of words, to think sideways
and upside-down. Visual-thinking instructor, David Haygood, from IDEO,
developed principles of making the familiar strange. Used in many art
schools, such techniques are useful, especially at this age, to help the
child think “outside of the box” and think of well-crafted yet novel ways of
expressing her imagination.

Digital technologies can be used help foster literacy beyond print or dialogic
writing. Of particular relevance, at this age, are hybrids, such as text-based
storytelling and role-playing environments, as well as environments that
enable one translate text into speech (i.e. speech synthesizers) and to use
text as commands. All provide new ways of integrating speech and writing
and navigating between oral and textual literacy and their respective modes
of thought (Ong, 1982). All do so by reconnecting authors to their audiences
and interlocutors, and by bringing audiences back to the site of a plot.

227

E-mail and other on-line “messaging” services allow older children (7 and up)
to join in virtual communities. Participants can send and receive messages
using text editors, which allow them to compose/edit on the screen, move
text around by cutting and pasting, reconfi gure, and rearrange text. Kids can
also send images, sounds, and build composites.

Networking is often used in schools as a way to help children who like to be
“connected” to engage in writing. In social virtual environments, or MUDs,
participants engage in anonymous role-play, enacting multiple characters,
putting on different masks, exploring aspects of themselves otherwise
concealed. MOOSE Crossing is a text-based MUD created by Amy Bruckman
in which kids can converse, exchange gestures, and express emotions in real
time. Kids describe places by using words. According to Bruckman, they use
typographic conventions like “emoticons” to replace physical gestures and
facial expression, and they use onomatopoeic expletives, and often ignore
spelling errors. In MOOSE Crossing, words and programs are intimately
connected. Words are used both to describe things and as commands to
trigger interesting event. Words here are used as keys to trigger actions and
events. Children’s experiences on MOOSE Crossing take place in a web of
social relations. Their writing is both multi-authored, ephemeral, and with
a string of verbal commands to transform the world. All happens in situ.
(Bruckman, 1999).

NOTE:
While most adults deplore youngsters’ increasing indifference to spelling
errors, children nowadays learn to spell in new ways. Like many of us,
they set the spell checker of their word-processor on “signal” mode and fi x
underlined words as they write along. Sometimes they fi nd the right spelling
by themselves. Sometimes they look it up. More often than not, they learn
quite a bit, and effortlessly, as a result of using a spell checker.

229

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Bibliography

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