School Journal | Log 7 | Basic Concepts(Before School)

In log 1 I had listed out 7 key skills that children seem to pick up during their first 5–6 years. In the next few logs I explored some of these skills:

• log 2 — motor skills
• log 3 — language skills
• log 4 — cognitive skills
• log 5 — creativity & imagination
• log 6 — social & emotional skills

Now I shall attempt to understand a slightly more spread out topic of learning, the wide range of basic worldly concepts that children learn during the first 5–6 years of their life.

Once again, I started with a generic question, “how do children develop social and emotional skills”. This time, Google returned a bunch of links, but no AI generated answer. So, I went straight to Gemini to ask the same question as a starting point.

The key takeaways here are pretty much captured in the first sentence of the answer. The process through which children pick up basic concepts is like learning a language and a bit more. There are 2 steps at play here:

• Language exposure — Parents and the people around children talk about a wide range of concepts. Children further are exposed to words relating to a concept in the form of books which are read to them, songs and anything else they can observe in their world. Just the way in which they pick up a language they are likely to learn words relating to the concept and begin to assign sensible definitions to them. For concepts like shapes, colours, texture, taste, smell and sound this is the bulk of the learning about the concept which happens when they’re children.
• Hands-on experience — Through activities like playing and other parts of a child’s daily routine, they may encounter and try to work with these basic concepts. This may help reinforce basic concepts like colours. This will particularly help build a mental model around more involved concepts like numbers, direction, time and ordering. For such concepts, beyond the definitions of terms, there are ideas of how elements combine and affect each other.

Now that I have a starting framework of how children learn basic concepts, I will have a look at some of the results from my google search. The articles will either add some more detail to my starting framework, or might contradict and reshape it a little bit.

The articles from which I have gathered most of my insights are from:

• Kid therapy .org
• Child development .com.au
• Handy handouts .com

What are basic concepts?

Basic concepts are in many ways a subset of vocabulary. However, more than other parts of vocabulary they contribute to comprehension. This makes sense because a lot of communication is about a concept or involves multiple concepts. To put it another way, words relating to basic concepts are often the key words in normal sentences.

There appear to be 5 types of basic concepts which are gradually understood by children early on:

• Spatial / directional
• Temporal
• Quantity and ordering
• Qualitative
• Social-emotional

There are of course many specific basic concepts which children learn during this phase. However, all of these concepts seem to fall within these 5 categories.

Examples of basic concepts

To get more specific, here are some basic concepts. These are of course not comprehensive, but just to paint a picture:

• Spatial / directional — front, behind, top, bottom, here, there, north, south, in, out…
• Temporal — now, later, earlier, today, tomorrow, yesterday, hour, minute, second, day, week, month, year…
• Quantity and ordering — one, two, three, more, less, plus, minus, first, last, before, after…
• Qualitative — big, small, shapes, colours, not, no, smooth, rough, tall, short, wide, narrow…
• Social-emotional — happy, sad, funny, angry, hungry, excited, bored, jealous, thankful, lonely…

There probably isn’t much value in trying to list out all the basic concepts. There are far too many of them. Learning concepts will of course continue well into school and maybe beyond. Rather than actually using this structure or list of concepts, actual necessity in life is very likely to effectively cover all basic concepts of importance.

How do children learn basic concepts?

Each of the articles lists out a few different types of activities which help promote learning of basic concepts. Some of these activities are reading, describing actions and the world at large, singing songs and playing games. Each of these activities are the same ones which are recommended for some or many of the previous skills which we have explored. There is greatest overlap with the activities which are recommended for language learning as well as a great deal of overlap with the activities suggested for cognitive development.

This is altogether sensible, and very in line with the initial takeaway from the AI generated answer. Thus, with a great degree of confidence, I can now back the initial idea that basic concepts are learnt through 2 broad steps of:

1. Language exposure
2. Hands on experience

The most interesting thing that I can now do is to pay attention to new concepts that I learn these days. They probably won’t be as basic as the ones which are picked up in early childhood. But at work, I will likely hear terms and pick them up through the step of language exposure. I will then most likely use or interact with these concepts more deeply while working, thus cementing the mental model of a new concept. Or perhaps I will spot some new patterns and deepen my understanding of how we learn basic concepts.

And with that, I shall now move on to understand the breakdown of the last key skill from my list of skills which children pick up before attending school.