According to Piaget, children are naturally curious therefore they are constantly want to make sense out of their experience. Children come to understand the world by using mental categories (or schemes) to organised, process and relate experiences. Toddlers are quick to grasp new learning experiences and the schemes are constantly changed. The learning experiences involves two processes known as the assimilation and accommodation.
To make these 2 big jargon into lay-men terms, the assimilation is an existing learning process that has been categorised in the child's mind and the accommodation is when the category is being modified based on new learning.
A very clear example that I can relate to is based on Maximus's learning experience in term of the vehicles name. He has learned to about car - what is a car? How does a car looks like? etc. He can point to a car and say "car" when he sees one. Then later he learned about bus. He learned to say "bus" and then made a relation between the car and the bus. He categorised that car is smaller than a bus. So, in his little world he understands that a bus is big and a car is smaller.
Soon, he applied his skills - each time when he sees any vehicle bigger than a car (be it a lorry, truck, van etc) he will say it as "bus". Here, I've to correct him and tell him that it's a van or a truck instead. So to accommodate his new lesson, he modified his initial understand on the bus. Thus, he learns that not every vehicle that is bigger than a car is a bus!
I am really excited over this learning curve especially at this stage. Being a toddlers is a great realm of learning ...
Oatley 101 Art and Craft Exhibition
7 years ago
