Piaget's Four Stages

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The Art for Kids program taught me an exceptional amount about children’s development through the progression in the complexity of their drawings. Students drawing abilities can easily be related to Piaget’s stages of cognitive development theory, which describes the four major stages in children’s development. These include the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational stages. To easily determine a children’s abilities, the negotiated drawing technique works extremely well. It allows the instructor(s) to better understand the children’s thought processes by regarding how their drawings, before and after the story and negotiated drawing, relate to each other. I was able to experience this first hand during my …show more content…
This stage occurs between the ages of seven and twelve; during this phase of children’s development, they acquire the ability to logically analyze objects and events by using multiple approaches to describe objects/situation. They also develop the ability to arrange items into groups based on a variety of features, including size, shape and colour (Gazzaniga et al., 2016). The final stage of development according to Piaget is the formal operational stage. This occurs after twelve years of age. During this last stage, a person has the ability to think logically about abstract ideas and solve problems. In the previous stages, children did not give much thought to the future, including hypothesis and possible problems that could arise; during this stage these thought processes are developed completely (Gazzaniga et al., 2016). Children’s drawing development fits into developmental psychology as, as a child progresses through each of these four stages they become more aware of their environment with each. This progress can be seen in their drawings. Their thoughts become more complex and abstract, thus their drawings become more detailed and creative. This was easily regarded through the students’ drawings in the Art for Kids program due to the range of ages. Children who were five or six, showed signs of the preoperational stage, but were clearly nearing the concrete operational stage; the seven years old were more …show more content…
This allowed my lesson plan to flow very well. The children had very high energy levels and continuously wanted to run around, though, I was able to get them to settle down and concentrate on the art projects without too much difficulty. The students all did very well, making creative and detailed drawings, and showed significant progress in their artwork over the program’s four sessions. One of the prominent factors for this conclusion was the negotiated drawing activity, and its effect on the children’s