Milestones

When talking about a preschool child’s development, we often divide it into four main areas:

Social/Emotional – This area is all about socialization. Children need to learn the values and behaviors of society. It is also about having self esteem and becoming a confident person.

A child who is socially and emotionally ready for school is a child who is:

• Confident, friendly, able to develop good relationships with peers
• Able to concentrate on and persist at challenging tasks
• Able to communicate frustrations, anger, and joy
• Able to listen to instructions and be attentive

Physical – This includes the child’s gross (large muscle) and fine (small muscle) skills. Physical development contributes to personal health and well-being.

The main goals for children in the physical realm include:

• Moving the large muscles in the body deliberately such as running, jumping, hopping, galloping, and skipping.
• Using and coordinating the small muscles to help with scissors and writing tools.

Cognitive – This refers to the mind and how it works. It involves how children think, see their world, and how they learn.

The main goals for cognitive development include:

• Learning and problem solving – asking questions, making predictions, and testing possible solutions. This includes persistence and knowing how to apply knowledge.
• Thinking logically – gathering and making sense of the information by comparing, contrasting, sorting, classifying, counting, measuring, and recognizing patterns.
• Representing and thinking symbolically – using objects in a unique way like pretending in the dramatic play and using a broom to represent a horse, making a graph, or drawing a picture to show what happened to a character in a story.

Language – this includes understanding and communicating through words, spoken and written. Language and literacy skills go hand in hand.

Children’s goals in this area:

• Listening and speaking – using spoken language to communicate with others
• Reading and writing – making sense of written language, understanding how alphabet works, and writing letters and words