V

Cognitive Development

A

Understanding Stability and Change

Child recognizes and develops the ability to explain how material objects change and how they remain stable.

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Start to understand how ecosystems can change quickly (a storm) or slowly (a pond becoming a meadow)
• Combines and separates mixtures in sophisticated ways (e.g., uses a series of strainers to separate out the pebbles and silt in river water)

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Create opportunities for children to explore stability and change in local contexts
  • Visit a local watershed to study water quality
  • Look at photos of the local area in years past in comparison to today
• Ask about characters in chapter books (“How do they change over the course of the story? Why do they change? What is the same about them throughout?”)

B

Representing

Child uses symbolic thought to represent.

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Uses research to add realistic details to their representations (e.g., researches costumes from the past to create a dramatization of the life of a historical figure)
• Describes systems for symbolic thinking from the past, such as hieroglyphs

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Notice the particular forms of representation that are motivating for different children
• Encourage children to use art to represent their feelings
• Invite families to join children in creating
• Welcome families to celebrate children’s creations
• Challenge children to create models of villages, replicating complicated architectural details

C

Memory and History

Child develops the ability to store, retrieve, and share information about past experiences.

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Intentionally selects and uses organizational strategies to remember information
• Uses language to describe chronology, such as “decade” and “century”
• Uses resources such as books and websites to organize information into a chronological sequence
• Connects their family history to broad historical events
• Identifies changes over time in their community

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Use self-talk to describe strategies for organizing information to make it easier to retrieve
• Ask children to write from perspectives of figures they have read and learned about (What was it like to be a knight’s horse, for example?)
• Welcome children to link their family histories to larger discussions of historical events

D

Investigating and Exploring

Child becomes a scientific thinker by manipulating objects, asking questions, making observations and predictions, and developing generalizations.

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Compares their observations with observations in books and websites
• Poses specific questions and then seeks to answer them through research, experiments, and observations (e.g., child wonders how to make a brick and then reads about the topic and mixes various combinations of materials to see which make the best bricks)
• Identifies and interviews experts to find out the answers to their questions
• Reviews data recorded in tables over several days to draw conclusions
• Starts to understand observations as components of systems (e.g., solar system, digestive system) and identifies individual parts and how they work together

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Invite families to share areas of expertise with the class
• Support children in generating questions for research
• Provide graphic organizers so that children are able to successfully complete a multiday investigation
• Create role models for children
  • Visit scientists at work
  • Read about scientists who changed history
  • Ensure representation of women and members of non-dominant racial, linguistic, and cultural groups

E

Understanding Cause and Effect

Child understands and explores the causes and effects of actions and events.

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Demonstrates understanding of how humans have affected the environment and how actions and rules are adopted to protect the environment
• Discussing the purpose of tools (e.g., how windmills produce clean energy)

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Create opportunities for children to see how changing certain factors causes a predictable change in outcome
• Teach children about climate change and engage the class in analyzing and reducing the group’s use of carbon

F

Engineering: Problem-solving with Materials

Child plans and uses hands, tools, and technology to solve problems with materials.

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Takes more than one variable into account when solving problems with materials (e.g., considers both weight and distance when setting up a balance)
• Plans their actions when encountering a difficult problem with materials
• Systematically builds things and reverses their actions to take things apart
• Identifies tools and simple machines made to solve problems by people long ago or in a different place, and compares those tools and machines to the ones we use today

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Invite families to visit the classroom and share a tool from their culture, nation of origin, or childhood
• Provide opportunities for children to learn problem-solving strategies from one another
• Challenge children to invent objects to solve common classroom or household problems (e.g., a magnetic paper-clip picker-upper)
• Look for texts that show different ways a problem has been solved throughout history (e.g., irrigation)

G

Math

1. Comparing and Categorizing

Child recognizes some similarities and differences between familiar and unfamiliar people, objects, or experiences.

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Creates hierarchical categorizations (e.g., child categorizes plants based on the ecosystems in which they live, then divides the plants that live in the desert into cacti and succulents)
• Compares their home life to that of children who live in different places and to the lives of children who lived a long time ago

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Invite families to visit the classroom to talk about their childhoods; use Venn diagrams to compare and contrast
• Read books aloud about children who live in different kinds of families; ask the children questions about how the character’s lives are similar to and different from their own
• Visit a natural history museum or botanical garden and talk about the categories the curators use

2. Number Sense and Quantity

Child understands and explores numbers and quantity.

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Uses groups, multiplication, and place value to visually recognize sets shown briefly (“I saw groups of 10s and twos, so I thought six tens is 60 and four twos is eight, so 68.”)
• Rounds numbers to the nearest 10 or
• Builds skills to multiply and divide up to 10 × 10 accurately
• Solves word (story) problems using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Engage children in a cooking activity that calls for ingredients in ½, ¼, ¾, or ¹∕₃ measures
• Ask children to write word problems that fit number sentences for their classmates to solve
• Practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division skills using Jeopardy-type games

3. Patterning

Child develops the ability to identify, describe, extend, and create patterns.

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Skip counts by hundreds, tens, sixes, fives, fours, and twos
• Is able to detect an error in a number pattern
• Explains mathematical patterns using the properties of operations
• Generalizes the properties of multiplication: (a X 1 = a) (a X b = bXa)

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Create AABBA patterns for classmates to complete and/or find the errors
• Practice looking at an analog clock, describing the number correspondences
• Give children a sense of time (Time sitting in silence for a minute, then do something repetitive such as snapping fingers or drawing stars for a minute, two minutes, or five minutes.)

4. Spatial Sense and Geometry

Child understands how objects, points, lines, and shapes fit in space.

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Uses maps to follow routes, even when they don’t have pictures or the distances are not accurate
• Mentally moves shapes and says what they need to do to make them fit into a puzzle
• Names the class of shapes explicitly based on properties, including angle measure
• Sorts shapes hierarchically, based on properties

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Create realistic and abstract art using shapes, lines, and understanding of orientation of those things on paper
• Observe the use of shapes in artwork from different cultures, drawing attention to the cultures of the children in the class
• Describe the properties of a shape and invite the children to name that shape
• Place shapes in a category, and ask children to name the reason for the classification