stages of childhood development education

What are the Characteristics of Child Development Stages?

At each stage of development, children gain skills in four main domains. These domains are:

• The communication and speech domain. Children have to learn to communicate with everyone around them. As well as learning the language, they learn about taking turns in conversation, and how to categorize the world around them. This can be extremely difficult, and leads to interesting errors; for example, when a child learns that a round object is a ‘ball’, they have to work out if that means everything round is also called a ball. Is the moon a ball, and why not? It takes time to understand what separates one word from another.
• 
  

The physical domain. The body increases in skill and performance over time, going through gross motor development (learning to use large muscles, such as the arms and legs), and fine motor development (learning to use muscles to make precise movements, such as the hands and fingers).

• The social and emotional domain. Children’s identities, self-images and perceptions of feelings evolve as they grow. They also develop relationships with others, and learn how to socialise and follow social etiquette.
• The cognitive domain. ‘Cognitive processes’ are higher-level functions of the brain, including thinking, knowing, remembering, judging, and problem-solving. As they develop, children increase their understanding of the world, improve their