 Getting to know and becoming familiar with preschool child development and some of the many different ways in which preschool children and their behavior can be defined, is a key ingredient in interacting positively with your preschool child. With this in mind let's take a look at a few areas of preschool child development so you'll have a bit of a preschool development checklist to refer to.
In the beginning and first on the list is physical development. Preschool children are natural explorers. They go everywhere they can in the world they have around them. The first physical attribute to develop is what is known as their gross motor skills. These are defined as running, jumping, climbing, etc. As preschool children play and explore, you see these skills going from fairly rough to much smoother in a fairly short amount of time. The finer motor skills, such as writing, coloring (within the lines), drawing, cutting and pasting, and such will develop a bit later.
Next is cognitive development. This is closely tied to a preschooler's natural affinity to explore their world. With exploration, curiosity and the quest to understand how things around them function is prevalent. You'll see much role playing and imitation as preschool children have no experience yet to draw from. Pulling objects and toys apart in an effort to understand how things work is a big part of a preschooler's day. As their cognitive development continues memory and recollection will grow along with the concept of time and days. Role playing and imitation are still prevalent as reality isn't the dominant force yet. And the key for most of us to realize and remind ourselves of is that attention span is about 15 minutes... so be patient with their development.
Patience and understanding are the keys for you at this point. Remember that the preschooler's world at this point is primarily one of fantasy and high level discovery with very little attention span. Social development is next but at this point they haven't arrived. The preschooler's development has been one of exploring, role playing, and imitation. Physical skills are those of the larger muscle groups involved in exploring and playing.
As social development draws nearer for the preschool aged child, they will begin to learn how to interact with their peers. Early on though, the initial exposure to social development for the preschool child may be that of individualized group play. It is mean that the children will be together in a group, but will be playing with their own toys and not with each other. At this point, there is no type of group cooperation or interaction. As preschool social development continues you will begin to see the signs of cooperative behavior creeping in (probably around the age of 5 on).
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