Brain Development in Preschool and School-Age Children

As was mentioned previously, the brain processes which begin before birth continue well into childhood, and some go until adolescence as well. Much of the brain’s rapid growth can be attributed to the experiences that children are having each day as they explore the world around them, interact with parents and caregivers, and grow physically. These early experiences are often informal in nature. This all changes when children enter more formal educational settings such as preschool and K-12 classes.

Experiences once children begin to attend preschool become more intentionally designed to activate growth by providing children with experiences deemed essential for cognitive, social, and emotional development. For example, teaching children letter sounds and word meanings supports neural growth in their temporal lobe as it stimulates areas related to both receptive and productive language use. In preschool settings, children have opportunities to interact with peers of their own age, perhaps for the first time if they have been at home with a parent or caregiver since birth. These interactions are essential for triggering the synaptogenesis of neurons in the areas of the brain that help navigate social spaces, such as playing with friends. And as you just read, during this time myelination of the brain areas associated with better emotional control is taking place.

Not all preschool age children attend a formal preschool class, but many do. For the ones who do not, brain development is still occuring at a furious rate, as children have other experiences with parents, caregivers, and peers in other settings. Even children who remain at home until Kindergarten have plenty of opportunities that fuel their neural growth – provided the adults in their life create such opportunities. As you will learn in upcoming chapters, many cognitive functions have critical periods for their development – times when the right experiences must occur in order for a function to develop. Language is one example of this; children who are not exposed to spoken or sign language in the first years of life will always struggle to learn the sounds and grammar of their language. Vision also has a critical period, and children with vision issues such as a “lazy eye” or non-binocular vision (meaning the two eyes don’t coordinate what they see across the midline of the brain) can only benefit from interventions up until about age 4. (Berninger & Richards, 2002; p 88)

By school age, most children have had enough experiences to at least have fully functional brains and a healthy amount of connected neural networks. Children enter Kindergarten with a wide range of cognitive, social, and emotional abilities, but typically the physical structure of the brain is nearly identical to an adult’s brain. In school, children will learn to use their neural networks in the act of learning.

As brain research continues to evolve, so does what and how much educators know about children’s brains. A great deal of “best practice” in early and elementary education is based on what we know about how the brain works and how to teach to that. For example, in this book you will learn more about multiple intelligences and learning styles, both based on brain research that recognizes that the four areas of the cerebral cortex take in different types of information (visual, sensory, auditory, and social-emotional). The best practice for educators that are associated with MI and learning styles is based on the idea that designing curriculum that matches how the brain already wants to process information is much more effective than trying to make children’s brains learn in less efficient ways.