-
Alex Xiaotian Zhang was born on July 10, 2002, 8:15 pm at St. Peter's Hospital in San Antonio. His mother is Yehung Luo and his father is Lei Zhang.
-
This is the first stage of Piaget's cognitive stages. The sensorimotor period can be described as a stage in a person's life (0-2 years of age) where they begin to utilize their sensory and motor abilities on a very minimal and simplistic level. At the conclusion of this stage, object permanency, the ability to understand if objects continue to exist, is achieved.
-
Alex has a habit of sticking his thumb in his mouth and always wants to be near mom and dad! At 4 to 10 months, Alex has been in his babbling stage; he was uttering unrecognizable sounds. Now he has moved onto articulating phonemes, the most basic structural element of language, as a result of attempting to imitate sounds from his parents.
-
Peek-a-boo was a game played between mom and Alex. This game helps develop the ability of object permanency, the ability to understand that an object continues to exist when taken out of sight. This achievement indicates that an infant has developed understanding beyond their sensory and motor abilities.
-
Alex can now speak. He can formulate 1-2 word sentences and can now tell his parents what he wants. Alex begins to learn words more and more through fast-mapping, where a new concept is learned after brief exposure.
-
Alex was taken to China to see his grandparents for the first time. However, it didn't exactly go too well when his parents left him alone with his grandma; Alex cried quite a bit due to separation anxiety, which is stress experienced by a child when separated from his attachment figure/s. But much later on, Alex thought his grandma was really cool!
-
This is the second stages of Piaget's cognitive stages. In the preoperational stage (2-7 years of age), language acquisition accelerates rapidly. During this time, conservation, the ability to recognize that a set quantity will remain static when the container is changed, and reversibility, the ability to recognize a pattern backwards, begin to develop.
-
As a small child, Alex loved to read books on different animals. He always admired all the fish in the ocean ad really enjoyed nature in general. Perhaps it was the colorful illustrations in the books he read that kept his attention.
-
In the middle of the preoperational stage, animism, the belief that inanimate objects have mental characteristics, and ego centrism, the inability to differentiate the perspective of self to another, begin to develop. But according to mom, Alex did not exhibit any of these developments. As kindergarten rolled by and increased social interaction ensued, Alex remained very calm to others and rather saw eye to eye with his peers.
-
This stage (7-12 years of age) is described by the understanding of more complex concepts. However, these concepts are only understood if experienced with senses; in other words, children can only comprehend something if they had seen it, touched it, heard it, etc.
-
It seems that Alex really enjoyed the fancy art styles and linear plots in his books. When it was time to move onto chapter books, Alex grew disinterested: it was his inability to understand concepts abstractly as he is in his concrete operations stage. Picture books were very straight forward; interpreting the information was easy and straight-forward. Chapter books on the other hand, gave Alex a hard time because black and white text was much harder to comprehend due to the lack of visual aid.
-
This is the last stage of Piaget's developmental stages. Children (12+ years of age) begin to develop an understanding of abstract concepts. Reversibility and conservation can now be properly applied to real life situations. Hypothetical thought can be understood and is processed more frequently.
-
Alex is about a year into the formal operations stage. He is going through puberty, and his ability to process information has significantly changed and improved. Alex likes to ask very imaginative questions. He also likes to describe hypothetical scenarios to find out what he would do and what others would do.
