Cognitive Development the Bank Street

Cognitive Development

The Bank Street Head Start program claims to develop its teaching methods and curriculum around "the activities of daily living." Their approach is called "developmental-interactive" and is strongly focused on classroom environment and classroom materials. The curriculum also claims to enhance understanding of childhood development with the goal of stimulating children's "flexibility, imagination, and inventiveness." Children are encouraged to use their own imagination in their approach to art materials. They are taught to be self-directed in creative play and as unrestricted as possible. At the same time, being "part of a group" is also offered as a key learning experience and as a way to affect the children's social progress. Communication is taught not only in formal ways such as through appropriate language acquisition but also in informal ways that increase the child's sensitivity to peers and different points-of-view. Children are also allowed, even encouraged to make up their own language when making up stories: inventiveness is the hallmark of the Bank Street Head Start program. The manipulation of symbols and objects is the main way children in the program acquire knowledge.

Mathematics is taught in conjunction with classroom materials, an age-appropriate approach that accepts the young child's limited abstract thinking capacity. Sorting and counting are taught using hands-on materials or activities like cooking. Patterns and notions of time are taught in a similarly pragmatic fashion. Moveover, the young children are not expected to have grasped the concept of conservation. They are rather focused on counting, classifying, and sorting in the context of meaningful daily activities. Therefore, the Bank Street Head Start program builds on Piaget's foundation of cognitive development by placing age- and developmentally-appropriate learning activities within a meaningful context.

Scientific inquiry is encouraged, too. "Children are actively involved in formulating hypotheses, designing experiments, collecting and organizing data and drawing their own conclusions." Even though children at the pre-operational stage are egocentric and view the world as if it were solely their own, they still probe for answers and explanations about what they smell, hear, taste, touch, and see. Scientific activities also allow the children to witness cause and effect scenarios that enable them to develop appropriate cognitive skills. Those skills develop naturally in conjunction with verbal and mathematical thinking skills.

The Bank Street Head Start program loosely follows Piaget's theory of early childhood development. Children gradually and naturally incorporate new objects, experiences, and ideas into their cognitive schemas: the process Piaget called assimilation. Children also accommodate their old schemas to suit their learning environment.