Middle Childhood: Tearing Into Vocabulary

Cognitive development in children is crucial, especially between the age six-ten or what is known as middle childhood. During these ages, children are immersed in school and constantly learning new subjects and expanding their experiences. With this, teachers play an important role in coming up with engaging lesson plays that can expand children’s mental lexicon, improve long term memory and also reinforce pragmatic skills. A lesson plan from teachers.org, which can be incorporated into teacher’s curriculum, would be what is known as “Tearing Into Vocabulary”. With this activity, the teacher passes out different colored strips of paper and has the student’s fold the paper into four equal squares and then cut out the squares. Afterword’s, the

In the beginning of infancy to childhood, these children start their memory by following the system of sensory register to working memory and followed by long-term memory. By middle childhood, children increase their selectivity in their attention and work on improving their control of their attention and strategies. With this, children’s knowledge base expands because they gain more experience from inside and outside of home and school. When implementing “Tearing Into Vocabulary”, these students get the chance to come up with their own definitions and by putting vocabulary terms into their own words better increases their chances of using the words in the future and transfer the terms from working memory to long-term memory. Next, when the students work with their groups to piece together the vocabulary words with the definitions, it increases their memory by actually saying definitions out loud and effectively communicating with others and receiving others imputes and understandings. By receiving direct feedback from peers, it also influences the amount of information that is effectively stored in their long-term memory bank and forces them to focus their attention on to what their peers are suggesting. Implementing “Tearing Into Vocabulary” is a simple way to improve these middle childhood children’s long-term memory that stabilizes and expands the capacity of

The last stage of this activity allows the students to interact with their groups by receiving different vocabulary words to piece together in the right order. At this age period, some children have not mastered the technique of turn taking and listening while others are talking. By implementing “Tearing Into Vocabulary”, the children are learning effective ways to communicate with their peers and to effectively use new words in simple/complex sentences. When communicating with their peers, they also gain knowledge on how to properly respond, take turns speaking and paying attention instead of diverting their attention to outside distractions. Along with learning new conversational techniques, these children can also incorporate their improved mental lexicon since usually during these ages they tend to use words that they do not know the meaning of and tend to use them into their sentence to come off sophisticated in their speech. By implementing “Tearing Into Vocabulary”, this activity can help these children to effectively present the most accurate and appropriate way to conduct and maintain conversations with adults, peers, and teachers. Conclusively, “Tearing Into Vocabulary” can be a great classroom activity that promotes the growth of the mental lexicon, improvement of the long-term memory and reinforcing pragmatic skills. This activity provides confidence in children when communicating in social