Providing challenging experiences for your child is not only a form of affection, but a way to foster important intellectual growth. The most important facets of intelligence – thinking skills, memory, creativity, and problem solving – develop at an early age. By encouraging language, thinking, and learning skills at an age when your child is learning to distinguish between abstract and concrete terms, solve problems, and make judgments, you are actually helping to increase his or her intelligence.
The easiest way to develop language skills is to talk to your child. The more conversations you have with your kid, the more new words he or she will learn. The ability to express complex ideas is directly associated with the size of one’s vocabulary. Even talking to children that have not spoken a single word yet will teach them how to take turns talking and how to properly use facial expressions later on. Establish a balanced median between playtime with other children and solitary activities.
Critical thinking skills are crucial when it is time to evaluate the validity of an idea or situation. Children with strong critical thinking skills can make decisions based off the reality of a situation rather than relying on wishful thinking or naively accepting someone else’s advice. Children learn these skills by being asked difficult questions. Take some time to slow down and ask your child exactly what is going on in a particular situation. How do they feel about it? How accurate is the information that someone is telling them?
Curiosity plays a strong role in the acquisition of knowledge. Children who have an innate desire to learn are more successful than children who dont’t. Provide a fun environment for learning by playing educational games and buying books, educational software, and writing tools for your kid to play with. Encourage your kid to ask questions and ask them how they are doing in school. Try new, familiar, action-based, and cross cultural- activities to stimulate brain development, such as singing songs to your child with corresponding hands motions to initiate rhythm learning or passing a ball to him or her in-between phrases of a song. Since math is an area that too many kids struggle with, get a head start by playing ‘measurement games’ with a measuring stick. Desire a future scientist? Play an ‘element trading card’ game. Divide a group of children into teams and give each team five pieces of paper with different elements of the periodic table written on them. Have children fill out the number of protons, neutrons, and electrons for each element by researching the information on the internet. The team with the most correct answers wins.
Finally, utilize a large variety of tactics to keep your child interested. Children get bored easily. Make sure to expose your kid to as many people, experiences, and range of topics as possible. Encourage them to see correlations between all the different things they see and experience. Enhance development by taking your kid to fun places like a library, museum, or zoo. By increasing the variety of what your kid sees, he or she will be on the road towards becoming a well-rounded adult with passionate interests.
