| How to Improve Thinking Skills in Children? Tips and Suggestions |
3. Sep 2013|09:58 |
http://www.brainy-child.com/article/thinking-skills-for-children.shtml
By Andrew Loh
Enhancing thinking skills in your kid can be real fun and thrilling. Nothing can be more effective than asking the right type of questions in an easy going manner. Questions that you ask should have simple and proper wordings. When you ask questions that lead to a mental stimulation of your kid’s thought process, it can be really good for you as well as your kid. One of the most important things to remember while asking probing questions to your kid is to creating questions by using different types or levels or platforms of thinking.
Enhancing thinking skills is best performed in a systematic and well calibrated manner. Your kid will not be ready to think on many aspects of life. Your main goal should focus at motivating his or her inner level of consciousness. Experts in human psychology grade thinking skills in humans into six categories. These thinking skills are common to all individuals and you will need to modify or restructure the questions in such a way that your kid will understand and comprehend the meaning very easily.
Here are some steps that you can follow to develop thinking skills in your kid. It is easy to develop and enhance thinking skills by using the following six categories:
Developing Knowledge Skills
Knowledge skills include remembering, recalling or retrieving correct, right and appropriate and previously learned information or details to bring or draw out factual and data based answers which may either right or wrong.
To develop this skill:
You will need to use right words, phrases and sentences like: “when”, “how”, “what”, “how much”, “how many”, “where”, “tell me”, “detect”, “identify”, “list” etc. These wording are simple to understand and comprehend and they can help you kid to answer with a fair degree of certainty.
Sample Questions:
How many oranges are there in one dozen?
What is this color?
Tell me more about this picture
When is your birthday?
Developing Comprehension Skills
In reality, comprehension means grasping, comprehending or understanding the real meaning of materials that signify materials and things.
To develop this skill:
Use these words and phrases: “explain”, “describe”, “guess”, “predict”, “detect”, “identify” etc. These simple words will help your child to translate, interpret, and guess all those things that are materialistic in nature.
Sample questions:
Tell me how this dog eats food.
Explain how this seed becomes a tree
Can you guess what this figure is?
Developing Application Skills
This skill involves applying and adapting previously learned and comprehended information or details to new, strange and unfamiliar scenarios.
To develop this skill:
Use words that urge your kid to applying them to new situations. These words could be: “demonstrate”, “show”, “tell”, “solve”, “examine”, “apply” etc.
Sample questions:
What is common between this ball and that globe?
Tell me the difference between a plant and tree
Show me how a dog barks
Developing Analysis Skills
This skill involves breaking down a given bit of information into a number of parts or segments and later examining them in detail.
To develop this skill:
You can use very simple and easy to understand words like: “what is the main difference”, “analyze”, “discuss”, “explain”, “compare”, “arrange” etc. When you ask your kid simple questions that include these keywords, he or she will start thinking about the question by breaking the questions into many parts.
Sample questions:
Tell me one simple difference between a plant and baby
Can you tell me more about this egg?
Compare this Barbie and that Mickey. Tell me what the difference is.
Developing Synthesis Skills
This thinking skill is a bit difficult to learn and understand. It involves applying the previously acquired information, knowledge or skills to gel them together into a clear pattern which was not there before asking.
To develop this skill:
You may need to use simple words and phrases like: “arrange”, “rearrange”, “combine”, “design”, “compose”, “create”, “make” etc. When you ask questions containing these simple words, your child will start thinking to combine all the clues to form a clear pattern.
Sample questions:
What happens when you throw that puzzle on the floor?
How do you make this pattern by using all these pieces of puzzles?
What might happen if this plant starts giving fruits?
How do you arrange this room?
Developing Evaluation Skills
This skill involves judging, inferring, deciding and concluding based on a set of conditions or criteria, without real or wrong answers.
To develop this skill:
You may need to use keywords like: “assess”, “measure”, “quantify”, “explain”, “compare” etc.
Sample questions:
What is common between this globe and that egg?
What happens if you had a pair of wings?
Can you tell me the exact number of fruits in that basket?
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http://www.brainy-child.com/article/critical-thinking-skills.shtml
Developing Your Child's Critical Thinking Skills
By Andrew Loh
Child educators and counselors of the day keep using a number of buzz-words and definitions to explain the basic concepts of critical thinking skills. Some of them use words like creative thinking to drive home the idea, while a number of others employ words like higher-order thinking or logical thinking to explain the topic. Whatever the ideas or definitions are, one thing is quite simple; your child needs to improve his or her thinking skills to derive maximum advantages or benefits of productive and result oriented learning. All parents want their children to grow and develop with an important skill like critical thinking that eventually helps them to achieve personal and professional success.
Critical thinking skills help your children in a number of ways like:
Proper and meaningful analysis of available information. Information can come to you in many forms and nature. Some bits of information could be very trivial and simple, while a number of others are highly complex and variable. Analyzing and evaluating these bits of information in a proper manner needs highly advanced critical thinking skills.
To take correct and right decisions. Right decisions are the stepping stones for your success, both personal and professional. Taking correct decisions will help your children save precious time and energy. Other benefit of taking timely decisions is the decisive edge obtained during studies, as well as carrying out any type of highly competitive jobs.
Become successful enough to create new and creative ideas, suggestions and opinions. Today's competitive world needs equally competitive and cutting edge thinking processes. A person who can create new and better ideas can become successful, when compared to others who are quite poor in their critical thinking skills.
Be successful in solving complex problems. Life is all about solving any type of emerging problems. Children who develop critical thinking skills are more adept at evaluating the innate complexities of problems, and later take proper actions to solve those problems.
Act with a rational mind. Stable and rational mind is the byproduct of critical thinking skills. Children who develop these skills are always very stable in their attitude, persona, mind and action.
Develop logical thinking process. This is perhaps the most important skill that your child can develop and master during an early age. Logical thinking process is essential in segregating the good from the bad and right from the wrong.
Critical thinking skills are necessary to live a productive life by challenging an ever competitive world. The main goal of teaching your children critical thinking is to help them become empowered to take the accurate sense of information, adapt to new and emerging situations and develop necessary skills to identify, and solve any type of problems. There is a deep relationship between critical thinking and ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, who emphasized and believed in training minds and streamline brain functions to derive absolute and deeper truth.
Parents may express their doubts as to why their children need to develop these skills. Of all the skills, critical thinking skills are the ones that help their children in mastering their academic curriculum, as well as general study materials. In essence, thinking in your children is essentially motivated by asking critical questions. Asking the right type of questions will help your children clarify, solidify and crystallize basic thinking and logic.
Critical thinking also helps children to develop a sense of deep inquisitiveness and curiosity. It will also help them in asking the right and precise types of questions, critically examine critical problems, and later find and seek ways to solve complex problems on their own. In other words, critical thinking process assists your children in becoming independent and expressive in their basic persona. These skills will also help them in developing life-long ability to solve problems.
Here are some general tips and suggestions to help your children develop critical thinking skills:
Encourage your children to ask probing questions: Get to know what your children are thinking in their mind. Ask what they think about a particular situation or scenario. Develop active conversation with your child.
Unnecessary criticism can prove counter-productive: Low self-esteem in your children could be due to over-criticism. Unnecessary criticism may also make your children develop very poor self-image and self-confidence. Be supportive when you find your children doubtful or unsure of their abilities to carry out school work.
Your children's opinions are as important as yours: Just remember that your children are individuals with their own mental makeup. Respect their opinions and honor their intentions. Your children are not your mirror image! If you help and assist your children in expressing themselves and their opinions, you can have very confident individuals.
Create a nurturing environment: Love and respect your children, even when they are wrong in their ideas and expressions. Children like an environment or ambience where they are loved and respected.
Teaching critical thinking process is a two-way traffic. Your children need your full support and training, while you need their cooperation and learning attitude to help them achieve cherished goals. Once you make your children understand the importance of critical thinking, you can rest assured that you will have happiest children in the whole world.
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