Jump-starting Your Child’s Brain
Teachers use the following activities to bring a learner’s thought up to college level. You can do it now, even if your child is two years old.
Intelligence is measured by how many words you know, because words are ideas. A two-year old child may have a vocabulary of 12 words or 2,000 words, according to Dr. Piaget.
Your child will be smarter and more able to compete in this difficult global economy if you raise him or her to know many words and ideas.
Here are the basic ways teachers teach thinking skills to your child.
1: Recalling information
Every idea or concept—simple or complex—begins with recall of facts.
In order to develop this thinking skill, teachers use activities like the following:
Look at books, tapes, charts, newspapers, magazines, diagrams, records, models, people, films, television, or listen to the radio for ideas.
Then show, explain, locate, demonstrate, recognize, discover, restate, identify, inquire, match, illustrate.
For example: Using a children’s book, look at a page and ask your child to identify small things, such as anything red—or round—or covered with fur, etc.
If your child cannot focus well enough to recall facts, take away the streaming media (gradually) until the attention span is longer. T.V. and other media shorten a person’s ability to focus for long enough to master learning the higher order thinking skills.
Brain pathways must be built by exercising them.
2: Application
Every higher concept must go through steps one and two before going on.
Look at this diary, scrapbook, photograph, collection of objects, stitchery, cartoon, map, mobile, model, sculpture, illustration.
See if you can organize similar objects together, apply a code to the puzzle, construct something like it, sketch it, paint or draw it, solve it, choose something in the kitchen like it, and experiment with it.
For example: Look at this collection of tools, and see if you can circle the ones which belong in our garage.
3: Analysis (taking apart the known)
Make a graph, survey, questionnaire, commercial, report, diagram, or chart.
In order to do that you will have to categorize, take the data apart, sorting and classifying, dissect, analyze, separate, compare, contrast and describe.
For example, in order to create a graph of the side effects suffered by grandfather because of his fourteen different medications, you will have to take each medication separately, listing the side effects by category, then compare side effects by checking off the ones your grandfather has. One young lady recently confronted her grandfather’s doctor with a graph listing the medication names on the top line, the side effects down the left side, and the problems her grandfather suffered in each cell of the spreadsheet. Of twelve medications, grandfather had dizziness, insomnia, constipation, and nausea caused by eight of the medications.
4: Synthesis (putting together the new)
This requires Steps 1, 2, and 3, and then one can…
Consider a story, poem, play, pantomime, news article, cartoon, new game, invention, radio show, product, recipe, magazine, puppet show, pantomime…
And add to it, create, imagine, combine, plan, suppose, modify, predict, hypothesize, design, invent, explain, infer, improve, compose or originate a product from this.
For example, taking a recipe for pancakes, modify it to make muffins.
5: Evaluation (judging the outcome)
Looking at an editorial, a panel evaluation, court trial, or a self-evaluation survey,
Justify, debate, solve, recommend, judge, criticize, consider, weigh, appraise.
For example, ” Using steps 1-4 and the rubric provided for your teacher for this project, decide what grade you should receive.”
If you will spend twenty minutes a day on one or two of these activities, your child will be able to think far ahead of his or her competition in school and the workplace.
