Imaginations of PreSchool Child
Imaginations of PreSchool Child
So far as can be determined imagination does not enter into the early mental activity of the infant.
The period is given over completely to the absorbing business of storing up a wealth of sense impressions. The first two years are often spoken of as the matter of fact period when things are as they appear to be. That are sometimes taken to be the first imaginings of the infant are truly often memory images or mental pictures of former experiences called up through associative processes by the actual presentation of some part of that earlier experience.
Memory and a fund of experience it would seem must precede true imagination, for imagination as distinguished from memory is the activity in which images may arise freely without order or relation to reality while memory is the reproduction of original experiences.
The beginnings of imagination are so bound with memory that it is difficult to recognize their first appearances. Dr. Major, through a close study of the activities of his child, recognized imagination in “five classes of the infants activity”
(1) As early as the fifteenth month the child showed an element of imagination in devising plans to bring about desired ends.
(2) In the eighteenth month he showed originality in his expressions of desire.
(3) He engaged in imaginative play during the twenty-fifth month.
(4) In “uncontrolled play” there entered the element of constructive imagination during the third year. (5) “Assimilative imagination” or the fusing of two images, perceptual and memory, to form a new image, was recognized early in the third year.
Imaginations of PreSchool Child
When the child’s mind does finally shake loose from the shackles of literalness at about two and a half or three years, There comes a period of reveling in imaginative flights, when there is almost no limit to make believe,fabrication, and imagined experiences with imaginary companions. This unrestrained imagination tends to decline during later childhood through widened experience with reality and educational training.
The fanciful imagination of the child between three and seven years becomes more matter of fact though still productive from ten to thirteen years. During adolescence the developed emotional life again adds the elements of intensity and fancy similar to those of the first period, and daydreaming becomes a delightfully satisfying experience.
The imaginings of the adolescent differ from those of the small child in content. Those of the later period are concerned primarily with persons, their activities, aspirations and plans rather than
with fairies and impossibilities.
Progress is dependent upon creative, productive imagination.Through experience and training the child learns the difference between the real and the fanciful, and learns to turn daydreams into actuality.
To crush a child’s imagination is to destroy one of life’s greatest gifts, a source of pleasure and agent of individual improvement. “Imagination has the power to alter the face of the world, to bridge distance, to annihilate time;
like the artist it is skillful to glorify and enrich On the moral side of life, it knows how to comfort and encourage, to inspire and control, to animate, and to rejoice.”
Imaginations of PreSchool Child Article Source ; The Psychology of preschool child Submitted by Iris Coldwell Frampton
