Component 4: Cognitive Flexibility
Standard 4.a: Children’s skills increase at adjusting to changes in demands, priorities, and perspectives.
By the following age ranges, children typically, for example:
- Try new actions with a familiar object (e.g., dropping or throwing a rattle in addition to mouthing it)
- Demonstrate an ability to self-soothe or calm (e.g., babbling or sucking on their thumb or fists)
- Develop their own regular sleep-and-wake cycle
- Begin to show an anticipation of familiar routines
- Use their bodies as “tools” (e.g., as a means to an end: reaching out and grasping to get a rattle, for example)
- Use basic items creatively (e.g., turning a pail over to use it as a drum)
- Demonstrate comfort in familiar routines and activities
- Engage in more complex play sequences based on an understanding of everyday events and routines (e.g., pretending to punch in numbers on a phone and then “talking” to grandpa after waiting for an answer)
- Understand the use of people as “tools” for help (e.g., recognizing that an adult can reach an object for them on a high shelf)
- View world from an egocentric perspective (e.g., crying when frustrated that things are not going their way)
- Change their behavior in response to environmental cues (e.g., when an adult sits on the floor with a book, they put down their blocks and go over to the adult to listen to the adult read)
- Change their behavior in response to their environment by using the “tools” around them (e.g., if a toy is on a towel, pulling the towel to bring the toy closer, rather than just going over to the toy)
- Use objects in new ways to solve a problem or meet a goal (e.g., propping up a track with a piece of chalk so a toy train can pass underneath)
- Transition from one activity to the next activity with adult support
- Adjust when necessary to brief disruptions in routines (while still preferring consistent rules and routines)
- Make use of their environment by adapting objects as “tools” (e.g., using a stick to reach something that is under a chair)
- Require minimal adult support to transition from one activity to another (e.g., moving from computer to circle time)
- Understand that different contexts may require different behaviors (e.g., taking off shoes when entering their house but leaving them on when entering the classroom)
- Generate a new approach or change their plan of action if a better alternative is found or suggested (e.g., accepting a suggestion to secure a tower’s greater stability by building it on the floor rather than on a thick rug)
- Understand that not all children want the same things
- Quickly adjust and adhere to a new rule (e.g., lining up inside the building rather than outside when the weather gets colder, or it rains)
- Apply different rules in different contexts that require different behaviors (e.g., using indoor voices or feet versus outdoor voices or feet)
- Reconstruct a pattern using different materials or modalities
- Sort by more than one attribute (e.g., color and shape) into two or more groups
- Correctly add an object to an existing series (e.g., of increasing lengths
