Theory and Practice Assignment Assessment. Nature and children's cognitive development .

Nature and Cognitive Development
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Cognitive development refers to being able to think across lifespan which involves being able to categorize, plan, remember, conceptualize and being able to solve problems. In children cognitive development focuses on their development in terms of processing information, skills, learning of languages, identifying and putting resources among all other stuff that the adult brain can do. Cognitive development is related to how an individual despite age perceives and understands the word via learning and genetics factors. This type of development is also referred to as intellectual development and has four stages in which human beings must go through. These stages are reasoning, intelligence, memory, and language. According to the cognitive development theory developed by (Schacter, 2009), cognitive development has four development stages which include: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and a period of formal operational.
Nature is used to refer to the physical world in terms of the outdoors environment for human beings. Time spent in the natural environment is important for the cognitive development of a child's brain. Nature play helps in stimulating skills that are creative and problem-solving to kids' brain development. Nature allows children to be fast learners as they can classify, observe, explore and interpret situations that are around them in broad terms or ways. Children that spend their time outdoors help in increasing their concentration levels along with cognitive abilities. Outdoor activities are also important for adults and not only children as it assists in growing their thinking abilities at an expanded level. Experience from outdoor activities broadens a child's mind more than the classroom or inside the house activities which mostly tend to make a child dormant. Nature is an important vessel if a parent is aiming at developing cognitive skills for his or her child.
People's abilities to think in more complex ways are reasoned with the fact that there are stages of development that make individual process information in a complex manner. The sensorimotor stage begins when an infant to approximately the age of two years and how one behaves or thinks is because of lack of logic but aided by the generic reflexes and interaction with the environment to represent the world around him or her (Freyder& Jackson, 2008). These inherited reflexes are mostly used as repetitive behavior for instance when a child is 2 months and puts a finger in its mouth and sucks on it and if the child finds it interesting then this idea or behavior will be repeated always. At 18 to 24 month a child starts mental playing by use of symbolic objects which helps in cognitive development and thus the kind begins its intellectual journey.
The preoperational stage occurs at the ages of 2 to 7 years and is characterized by egocentrism where the kid thinks that everything is his or hers. Children at this age also view conditions and events in their ways and hate being told otherwise. They also objectify a lot of items and their problem-solving abilities are mostly dependent on multiple approaches. Children happen to personify their toys and o...