How Elementary Students Learn
By Scott B. Hamilton, Psy.D., HSPP; Director of the Russel & Mary Williams Learning Project at Park Tudor School
The elementary school years are when a child’s thinking becomes more complex and sophisticated. Children begin to engage in logical reasoning, and they are able to focus on more than one aspect of a concept or a situation at the same time.
They start to show advanced classification skills, being able to group objects with some similarities within a larger category of meaning. Critical thinking and problem-solving skills also emerge during the elementary school years.
Elementary-aged children begin to view situations from others’ perspectives, moving beyond the egocentric thinking that is a normal characteristic of early childhood. Over the course of elementary school, children typically become fluent readers; they transition from “learning to read” into “reading to learn.” They also begin to move away from a literal understanding of spoken language towards comprehending figurative language (e.g., “she let the cat out of the bag”) and sentences with multiple meanings (e.g., “The man was on the board.”).
Children’s social relationships become increasingly important as elementary school progresses. Children at this age are more likely to establish friendships with others of the same gender. Often, common interests and abilities dictate the formation of peer groups. An important developmental task for children is to begin to develop an understanding of themselves as learners and to be able to think about their own thinking, a process psychologists call “metacognition.”
Read more in the complete article at right, "How Elementary Students Learn," about how adults working with elementary-aged children can help them through this stage of development.