Applications: Piaget's Concrete Operational Stage

1.Reinforce and continue using concrete and hands on materials. For example, use models and demonstrate experiments in Science, show replicas or artifacts in History, demonstrate how to's in EPP and many more.

2. Organize the materials and concepts presented. Don't bombard children with too many factors and lengthy explanations. Be concise and brief. For example, Give an experiment or instruction with considerable number of steps. Or let children only read short stories 2-4 pages or children's book rather giving them lengthy stories with a lot of twisting plots.

3. Always relate the children to their prior experiences before presenting a new topic. Ask questions related to their lives or personal experiences so that it will be easier for them to assimilate information and to instill in their minds what is being presented. Like in discussing a story, teachers often ask if children can find similarities on the traits or on the situation the characters in the story are into.

4. Let the children classify or group things. Use graphic organizers to make it easier like matrices, charts, diagrams, etc. This will make their logical ability improve and develop. Riddles, Mind Twisters and Brain Teasers can also help. Give more of divergent questions rather than convergent questions because the former give children more opportunity to think and stimulate imagination.

Concrete Operational Stage: Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Children ages 8-11 are under this stage. On this stage, children have the ability to think logically. However, this only includes those concrete objects and the things they can perceive using their senses. Unlike the prior stage, concrete operational children no longer concentrate on one aspect or feature. Rather, they already know how to observe and to look at the other details of a person, an object and even a situation. In addition, children on this stage can now reverse their thinking. At last, if I will get a chance to teach a concrete operational child, I will now find it easy to teach the commutative property of addition and multiplication. Just a review, commutative property states that A+B is the same with B+A, or AxB is equal to BxA. In real life situation, this can be seen if a child now understands that he will have high grades if he studies his lesson and if he studies his lesson, he will have high grades.
Furthermore, children now have the ability to seriate, or to order or arrange things based on given criterias whether these will be on shape, size, color, etc. Lastly because of the above mentioned characteristics, a concrete operational child knows how to conserve. This is the ability to know that their are certain properties that do not change even there is a change in appearance. For example, a paper will still a paper even if it was crumbled, torn or cut. Or going back to Piaget's experiment on the glasses, a concrete operational child can already identify that the amount of water is equal even the two glasses are not identical.