First, children's thinking characteristics
● Tuoban (2 ~ 3 years old)
Kindergarten children mainly deal with graphic information and semantic information that can be perceived.
Their processing of graphic information has the following characteristics: the processing of graphic information is closely related to action, and children aged 2-3 are typical action thinkers, who perceive the world and gain knowledge and experience in action; I prefer familiar graphics to new ones. In the eyes of adults, children should be "fond of the new and tired of the old", but they are not. Familiar objects are children's favorite. This is because children's cognitive ability is limited, and there is a process of familiarity with objects. Familiar materials can bring them more sense of security. The processing level of graphic information is low, mainly understanding and memorizing, which is the need for children to better adapt to the environment. Moreover, their cognitive and memory activities are unconscious and greatly influenced by the characteristics of cognitive objects. Dynamic and interesting graphics are easier to remember.
The characteristics of their semantic information processing are: they can basically understand the sentences used by adults, but there are semantic deviations; Language expression is inherently driven, with fuzziness and conciseness. Children of this age like talking to themselves, shouting "Red … Yellow … Delicious …" when playing or eating. They are not as precise and emotional as adults, and often use one word to express the meaning of whole phrases and sentences. For example, when they say "ball", they may express the idea of "give me the ball" or "the dog took it away".
● Small class (3 ~ 4 years old)
The characteristics of small-class children in processing graphic information are as follows: although their ability to process graphic information is mainly based on cognition, understanding and memory, they can conduct simple divergence, convergence and evaluation activities under the guidance of adults; Initially, it reflected the classification activities, but the classification did not form a unified standard. They may have just started to classify small objects into one category, such as putting red squares, blue squares and red triangular houses together, but the triangular building blocks attracted their attention, so they kept adding red triangles and green triangles, and finally did not form a unified classification; Can rely on the surface similarity of objects for simple reasoning activities.
The characteristics of small-class children's processing of symbol information (the symbols mentioned in this paper are mainly abstract and representative information such as letters, Chinese characters and numbers, here numbers are the main ones): the general perception of size and numbers, such as distinguishing the relationship between one, several and many; Can sing a few songs, but the range is generally not more than 3 ~ 5 songs; Gradually learn the small range (physical form) of the points where the mouth and hands coordinate, but can't tell the total number of objects.
The characteristics of their semantic information processing: compared with kindergarten children, their semantic expression is more complete, their semantic understanding strategies are richer, and their ability to use complex modifiers has been significantly enhanced, such as "this cartoon is beautiful". Moreover, children in this period began to use feedback from adults to develop their semantic understanding ability.
● Middle class (4 ~ 5 years old)
The characteristics of middle-class children in processing graphic information: the graphics they can handle are more complex, and they can recognize more complex graphics in their ability to understand geometric graphics, which is no longer limited to simple and regular graphics. More importantly, they can handle some graphic system information, such as playing maze games and learning simple maps, which is very difficult for small class children; The ability to observe, judge and classify graphic information is much stronger than that of small class children. For example, compare the lengths of two ropes, one is a straight rope lying horizontally, and the other is aligned with both ends of the first rope, but it is curved. Most children in small classes must answer the same length. Even if they were asked to draw along the curved rope by hand, only when the experimenter straightened the rope in front of them could they correctly judge that the latter was longer. The first reaction of middle-class children is the same as that of small-class children, but the classification of middle-class children is consistent, and they will directly classify according to size, shape or color, unlike small-class children, which shows randomness; Ability to conduct reasoning activities according to category standards.
The characteristics of dealing with digital symbols: after counting the objects, the total number of objects can be said, that is, the original concept of number group can be obtained; At the end of this period, the phenomenon of quantity conservation appeared. We can take things by numbers, gradually understand the relationship between numbers, and begin to do the simplest physical operations.
The characteristics of processing semantic information: the comprehension ability of paragraphs has developed from paying attention to the literal information of paragraphs in kindergartens and small classes to mastering the order and theme of events initially. The richness of vocabulary types significantly enhances their sentence expression ability. At this stage, children can completely retell what happened or the story they just heard, and the words expressing a certain meaning are more abundant, such as "happy, happy and joyful" will appear alternately, and it is easier to use some idioms, such as "can't wait".
● Large class (5 ~ 6 years old)
The biggest feature of large-class children in dealing with graphic information is that they can deal with complex graphics composed of several colors and shapes, and they show convergent and divergent thinking in graphic processing. Moreover, the graphic evaluation ability of large class children has been qualitatively improved. When children are presented with the same number of two columns of objects, but the interval between the first column of objects is large and the interval between the second columns of objects is small, the illusion that the first column is more than the second column is created. When children are presented with these two columns of objects and asked which column has more objects, their first reaction is the first column, and then they are asked if they are sure. Children immediately use counting strategies to give correct answers and explain that their previous wrong answers are dependent.
Characteristics of dealing with digital symbols: most numbers within 10 can be conserved; Counting ability has developed rapidly, mostly from representation operation to abstract digital operation; Concepts such as ordinal number, cardinal number and operational ability have been expanded and deepened to varying degrees.
The characteristics of semantic information processing: the ability to understand semantic topics has been strengthened and the ability to express has been greatly developed. Their sentences can already contain 7 ~ 10 words, and there are also sentences with no less than 1 1 ~ 16 words, and the sentence is characterized by complex structure and joint structure, such as "I will go to aunt Xiaohong's house when I am free; Her rabbit is white and fat, very cute. " However, compared with primary school children, their ability to process semantic information is relatively weak, such as low vocabulary generalization ability, biased understanding of semantics, inaccurate understanding of spatio-temporal vocabulary, low understanding of polyphonic words and polysemous words, and difficulty in understanding "implication".
Second, the flexible application of educational strategies in children's thinking education
The educational strategy here is the general name of ideas, theories, strategies and specific methods related to early childhood education. It includes not only respecting children's educational ideas, but also teaching strategies such as questioning, scaffolding and migration, as well as specific methods such as rewards and punishments. Here are several educational strategies that should be paid attention to in thinking education combined with thinking courses.
● Choose appropriate learning materials.
Appropriate learning materials can be explained from two aspects. First, the material type should conform to the characteristics of children's thinking development. For kindergarten children, the main activity is to perceive and know the world around them, so as to better adapt to the surrounding environment. Their cognitive development ability determines that the information they deal with is mainly concrete graphics, and the need to communicate with people and deal with semantic information is also an aspect of their ability development, while abstract symbolic information is temporarily out of the scope. Therefore, the materials presented to kindergarten children should be mainly graphic and semantic information, and symbols can be gradually added to small, medium and large children. Second, the difficulty of materials should be in the child's "recent development zone". For example, "Teng Teng" and "Overlooking the town" are both to cultivate children's graphic cognitive ability, but "Teng Teng" is to help kindergarten children understand circular and non-circular, using some simple cards with different shapes; Overlooking the Town is a well-designed map to help middle school students better understand the orientation relationship between buildings on the map. Circular cards can not meet the cognitive development needs of middle school children, and map cognition exceeds the ability of kindergarten children.
● Choose an appropriate activity form.
First of all, the type of activity should conform to the age characteristics of children. For children in kindergartens and small classes, the development of cognitive understanding and reaction ability is still immature, and the activity setting should not be too complicated. However, activities for children in middle and large classes should be slightly more complicated. At the same time, kindergarten children have obvious self-centered characteristics. They like to act alone in activities, and parallel games are more than cooperative games. However, the desire and ability of cooperation and communication of middle and large class children have been obviously improved. If the children in the big class play the game of repeatedly rolling cards on the ground, I'm afraid they will feel childish and bored, but the children in kindergarten enjoy it. Secondly, for the three thinking abilities of graphics, symbols and semantics, the information objects they deal with need different abilities and intellectual factors, so the specific forms of activities are not the same. Semantic information is usually presented in a certain situation, and the expressions of characters greatly promote the understanding of semantic information. Therefore, semantic activities such as "giving gifts" have very cute anthropomorphic animals running through them, such as "Mother rabbit gives gifts to baby rabbits". Symbolic information is abstract, which helps children to play games in activities similar to life situations, so as to acquire the ability of digital concepts. For example, when buying fruit, the game situation of "fruit supermarket" is set up, so that children can count shopping lists, master simple statistical methods through games, establish a preliminary concept of equal division, and provide interesting fruit playing cards for children to break down numbers and establish contacts, and improve their calculation ability and comprehensive analysis ability. For graphic information, because of its perceptual characteristics, it is very important to start children's hands-on operation in activities, such as fishing, and emphasize children's hands-on operation. This is because hands-on operation combined with observation can better understand the characteristics of graphic information, such as touching the convex shape of the card and understanding the transformation of the graphic by rotating the card.
● Wait patiently and let the children think calmly.
Patience is one of the necessary educational qualities for preschool teachers. After the teacher gave a certain task, some children couldn't answer it or answered it wrong for various reasons. The teacher is eager to help the children put the pictures together or give the correct answers. Such behavior may hurt children's self-esteem, dampen their enthusiasm for playing games, lose the meaning of the game itself, breed children's dependence and lose the opportunity to cultivate their attention and willpower.
Of course, in the process of waiting, when children encounter bottlenecks, effective guidance from teachers is very important, but these guidance should be strategic, rather than directly telling the answer.