Late Childhood Ages 5 To 11

¶ … Childhood (5-11years)

Cognitive development

Cognitive development is the development of the ability to reason and think. Children who are aged between 5 and 11 years develop the ability to think in concrete ways such as addition, subtraction, order (sorting and alphabets), transforming and so on. These processes are termed as being concrete since they are performed in presence of events and objects being thought about. Cognitive abilities allow children to process the sensory information which they collect.

Metacognition can take various forms such as having knowledge of when and how to use specific strategies for solving problems or learning. It refers to a thinking level which involves having active control over the thinking process used in learning situations. It is divided into three components, namely; metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive regulation and metacognitive experiences. This skill is integral to children's future cognitive development as it involves different types of metacognitive awareness which include declarative knowledge which is the knowledge of an individual as a learner and factors that might have an effect on their performance. Secondly it involves procedural knowledge which is the knowledge of doing things and finally conditional knowledge that involves knowing when and why one should use declarative as well as procedural knowledge. Therefore we can say that metacognition allows students to plan, monitor and evaluate anything they do hence lead to success in school and in life (LearningRx Franchise Corp, 2014).

2. Sources of stress for children between the ages of 5 and 11

As children grow and change they become more vulnerable to stress and the situations which result in stress for these age gap also change. Events which lead to stress in young children might seem innocuous to older children and at the same time stressful situations in older children do not affect young children. Development changes that occur in children in relation to their environment are a major contributor to the changes in contexts that lead to stress. Young children are dependent on their care givers hence early forms of stress often relate to the absence or presence of a caregiver. In early years of preschool, stress is often as a result of efforts by caregivers to discipline children so that they can obey and comply. Another cause of stress is moving to a different culture. This is stress associated with transforming from one culture to another or mixed cultures as the child goes to school and meets other children.

A child's competencies or their capabilities that are related to physical, cognitive, and social and emotional development have an effect on how the child responds to stressful situations or interactions. Older children respond to stress differently as compared to young children. This is because of the physical, emotional cognitive development that they have gone through. Older children use emotion-focused coping strategies to manage or reduce emotional distress that arises in stressful situations.

3. Under nutrition and malnutrition