Lifestyle

How Kids Develop Thinking and Learning Skills

During their lives, kids go through different stages of development, and at each stage, they pick up different kinds of thinking skills. Although they were all born with different hereditary tendencies, kids need to be raised in an incentive environment in order to reach their full potential of learning and thinking. Adults play a key role in implementing and supporting a child’s learning, whether they are parents, teachers, or relatives, and here’s how it is applied in practice.

Language

Although learning to read in school is important for the development of literacy, concentration is even more important for growing language skills. Conversation is also of great importance, because it directs children’s attention to the important details of events and experiences and helps them learn. The content and quality of the language that parents use affects the development of cognitive skills. Language is more than the speech itself. It means using the body language, gestures, listening and understanding of what is said. Parents can help their children to develop these important skills by spending some time together talking to them and answering all of their questions with great care. 

Learning the second language

It is known that children learn foreign languages ​​more easily than adults, but this does not diminish the dilemma when it’s the best time to enrol a child to a language course. The first three years of a child’s life are considered the most productive for learning languages. These three years are essential for forming the attitude, thinking and general learning. Therefore, learning a foreign language isn’t any more difficult than learning one’s mother tongue. Many parents decide to enrol their preschool children to an learning centre not only to help them efficiently learn a new language in a group, but also to help their children develop social skills, play with their peers and learn how to interact with the world. At such a young age, children aren’t really aware of the fact that their parents gave them this opportunity because it’s useful for their future. They see it as a place where they make friends, have fun together and memorise fun English words. 

How do kids learn?

Just like any of us, kids are likely to meet different kinds of people they will learn something from. Parents and teachers can contribute to their development by having them understand the importance of experience in the world around them, and supplying this experience so they can develop interests and curiosity. A chance for kids to be more actively involved in learning from experience is crucial for their development. When a child experiences a new event, whether it’s good or bad, they try to understand the new experience by placing it into their already existing and well-known system of ideas. However, if that new experience could not be explained by what they already know, it encourages them to rise to new ideas and ways of understanding. By adding new ones or simply adapting the old ideas, or even joining new and old ideas together, children slowly build their knowledge.

Cognitive development

Children grow and change in various ways during primary school. The three fundamental aspects of their development are social, emotional and cognitive ones. Cognitive development suggests that children increase the reach of some thinking and learning skills. This includes attention, planning, languages, troubleshooting and memory. Overview of the development boundaries of those skills helps parents, teachers and educators to support growth in these domains. One of the best ways to support learning and thinking when children are still in elementary school is through active participation of adults, since it has positive effects on children’s mental health.

The order of development

Most children develop their thinking and learning skills in the following order. For instance, they begin to tell stories by looking at images in a book before they even learn to recognise the words. However, each child develops differently. These differences are the result of inherited tendencies, different experiences and opportunities they’ve been exposed to, or a combination of one and the other. The language helps them to organise an opinion. Slowly, capacities for thinking are being developed through situations of problem-solving and the development of one’s own ideas.

Memory 

It’s true when they say that children have a memory of an elephant. Their brain is like a sponge and they will remember things we even forgot we said them out loud. Memory is crucial for learning, and in order to build new ideas it is necessary to keep the ones previously learned, and build the new ones on top of them. As children become older, the amount of knowledge they store in long-term memory grows, but on the other hand, the short-term memory becomes more limited. When there is too much information to be remembered, the most useful way would be to teach children how to link content with certain words and rhymes. 

Every child is born as a blank slate, and parents take the whole responsibility for their child’s comprehension, thinking and learning skills. In order to see your children grow into people with mind and attitude, you have to devote to them while they are still little. Spend some quality time by reading stories to them, teach them how to think with their head and try to keep them away from TV as much as possible.

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