Child brain development activities: 8 Everyday Activities That Fuel Your Child’s Brain Development

Опубликовано: February 15, 2023 в 9:51 pm

Автор: alexxlab

Категории: Child

8 Everyday Activities That Fuel Your Child’s Brain Development

Did you know your child is making massive strides just by playing in dirt, building forts with blankets, and scribbling on paper? 70% of a human’s brain development happens during the first three years of life through play. And while you might think you need to get on it and start reading up on baby brain-boosting activities, hold on for a moment. Many of the mundane activities your child is doing at home are actually developing their brain right before your eyes. Here are eight of them:

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1. Looking in the Mirror = Baby Brain Development

With every gaze at their oh-so adorable reflection, your baby is making social and emotional connections that will eventually lead to a major self-discovery: “Hey, that’s me!”. Help your baby learn by describing what they might see in the mirror. Encourage them to smile and coo at the baby in the mirror.

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2.

Making a Mess at Mealtime Aids Brain Development

Yes, your toddler will touch, pat and squish their food. That’s because they are making brain connections by exploring their world through touch, taste and smell. Help strengthen important neural pathways in the brain by providing different textures for your child to explore, such as rough, smooth, or sticky items.

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3. Climbing on Everything Is Brain Development

When you find your two-year-old on top of the coffee table, they are not intentionally trying to scare you. They are exploring their world while working on the important physical skills of balance and coordination. Encourage safe climbing with lots of outdoor and playground time (and stay safe!).

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4. Blowing Bubbles Encourages Brain Development

You can never have enough bubble solution in your home…and for good reason. Your child’s bubble play is building the foundation for science, creative arts, and even mathematical thinking. Try adding food coloring and glitter to the bubble mixture for even more magical play.

Photo by Jessica Byrum / Stocksy

5. Finger Painting Is Brain Development

Finger painting is both a fascinating art and sensory experience. Watch your child’s face light up when they realize that when they mix yellow and blue together, an entirely new color is created! Give your child a boosted sensory experience by adding textured material like sand or rice to the paint.

6. Playing in Dirt Aids Brain Development

The natural world is its own unique learning environment. Something as simple as digging in dirt can help support a child’s curiosity. So give your young scientist plenty of opportunities to dig and dump. Add a magnifying glass so your child can look at dirt, rocks and small creatures up close.

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7. Building Forts Is Brain Development

Blankets and pillows are irresistible indoor fort-building materials. But before you halt construction, consider this: building and crawling through indoor forts is a great way for children to get exercise and can help develop skills such as spatial awareness, planning, and problem-solving skills.

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8. Scribbling Is Brain Development

Did you know that scribbling on paper is part of the natural progression toward writing? Experimenting with writing and drawing tools helps build the small-muscle skills and hand-eye coordination needed for writing. Providing baskets of paper and chubby crayons and pencils will give your child plenty of pre-writing opportunities.

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Child Brain Development Activities

Play Games Involving Hand Movements

Since children learn better by using their senses like touch and sight, teach your child to play games involving hand movements. These types of brain development activities include Patty Cake, Peekaboo, and hand puppets to help your child learn interaction with nonverbal cues (hand motions), language, and sight.

Make a Mess

Yes, you should encourage your baby, preschooler, or kindergartner to make a mess! Although it makes for an extra clean up for you, brain development activities like mess-making increase your child’s understanding of the world around them by exploring their senses. When a child makes a mess with food, dirt, sensory bins, and more they are activating most or all of their five senses at once.

Let’s look at an example: If your baby is allowed to make a mess with his or her food, your baby is…

Discovering the texture and temperature of the food through touch
Hearing the squishing and mashing of food between his/her fingers
Seeing how the food moves when squished
Tasting the food to discover different fruits and vegetables
Smelling a food with his/her nose and recognizing scents he/she likes

Reading

An early love of reading fuels the development of increased brain connections for understanding and eventually using language in everyday conversations. For children, the peak time to begin reading to a child is immediately! Even if you have a newborn baby, early reading is the perfect opportunity to begin developing your child’s brain connections for early language.

Explore Through Climbing

Of course, climbing develops a child’s gross motor skills, but this is one of the brain activities for kids that boosts balance, coordination, and spatial awareness. Learning games for kindergarten-aged children include recess time on the playground that includes climbing on playground toys. So how exactly does climbing help child brain development?

Brain activities for kids like climbing:

Increase concentration
Help your child problem-solve (deciding where their hands and feet go to best climb an object)
Helps the brain over time develop logical thinking skills like visualization (pre-planning through visualizing their route to climb up an object)
Increases a child’s confidence and determination

Cuddling

Physical touch is greatly associated with boosting brainpower in babies and small children! According to Development and Psychopathology, researchers discovered toddlers who were held and cuddled less by caregivers were more distressed in their DNA profile and had slower developmental progress. So the next time you feel like you’re holding or cuddling your baby too much, don’t feel bad! Instead, continue to cuddle with your child through their toddler years and beyond to boost brainpower!

Repeat After Me

This is one of the learning games for kindergarten-aged children that can be played anywhere! Simply, have your child repeat a beat when you clap your hands. With time, your child will learn to count along to each beat learning that numbers are more than just repeating words. They will begin to learn simple math basics and notice patterns in everyday life.

Ask Questions

Once your toddler begins to speak, ask questions related to everyday life. Asking questions about everything you do throughout the day related to the activity you are doing. If you’re doing a cooking lesson with your child, ask questions about what to do next or what your child thinks will happen when combining ingredients. Example: “What will happen when we put the sugar cookies in the oven?”

Questions increase child brain development by putting your child on the path to logical thinking. Plus, it also increases their curiosity about the world around them!

Child brain development occurs on its own throughout a child’s life. However, 90% of brain development is complete by the time your child enters kindergarten. To make sure your child is reaching his or her full potential in regards to brain development try to add in some of the above brain development activities each day!

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Development of mental abilities | Multnomah County Library

Books, kids and the brain! Blimey!

Babies learn from birth. The science of brain development tells us that the first three years of life are very important for the formation of the brain of a small child. During the first year of life, brain size more than doubles. At age three, a child’s brain is twice as active as an adult’s. During this time, the brain prepares the foundation for a lifetime of learning and future academic success.

Parents, grandparents and caregivers play an important role. They can have a huge impact at this early stage of brain development. Newborns and young children learn best through warm and sensitive parenting. When you hold a small child in your arms, talk to him or read to him, connections are formed in his brain. The brain of a healthy child will eventually form trillions of such connections! Scientists also tell us that stimulating the brain of a newborn or young child can be done through simple actions: singing simple songs, talking and the colors and textures they see in the grocery store, reading daily while the child is sitting in your arms. Simple steps with amazing results.

A new vision of child brain development.

Brain research is complex, but the basic idea is simple: babies learn from birth! The latest discoveries in the field of neuroscience over the past few years are giving us a whole new understanding of how the brain develops. This research has been facilitated by the development of sophisticated brain imaging systems such as PET scans.

The structure of the brain is not determined genetically.

How the brain develops depends on the complex interplay between the genes you were born with and the experience you had. There has been clear evidence that activity, experience, attachment, and stimulation determine brain structure.

Early experiences affect the way the brain works.

Incredibly, a baby’s brain is largely unformed at birth. Most of its 100 billion neurons are not yet connected in the network. Some neurons are programmed to perform specific functions, such as breathing and heart work, but for most, the tasks have not yet been determined, and they are waiting for experience in the environment to determine their function. Connections are created by sensory experience: seeing, smelling, touching, and especially tasting, which stimulates the growth of neural connections. The formation and consolidation of these connections is the main task of brain development at the initial stage. By the age of 3, a child’s brain is twice as active as an adult’s – and remains so for the first ten years of life. The child’s brain forms twice as many synapses (connections) as the child actually needs. If these synapses are used regularly in a child’s daily life, they will become fixed. If they are not used regularly, they will be removed. Thus, experience plays a critical role in shaping the structure of a child’s brain. Activity levels drop naturally during adolescence as the brain “removes” unused connections like weeds.

Brain development is non-linear; there is the best time to acquire different kinds of skills and knowledge.

The human brain has an incredible ability to change, but time is a critical factor. Although learning continues throughout life, there is a “best time” for optimal development. Negative experiences or lack of proper stimulation at certain points in life have more serious and long-term consequences. This ability of the brain to change depending on the environment is called “neuroplasticity” of the brain.

Interactions at an early age have a decisive influence on the nature and extent of adult abilities.

Children learn in the context of relationships that are important to them. Care and nurture at an early age has a decisive, long-term impact on how a person develops, on his ability to learn and his ability to control his emotions. Early attachment research confirms that warm, empathetic care is essential for healthy brain development.

Development of a child’s brain from birth to age 3

70% of a child’s brain development occurs during the prenatal period, 15% during infancy, and another 15% during the preschool years. Until the baby is born, as well as in the first months after birth, that is, during the breastfeeding period, its development and health are almost completely dependent on the mother’s nutrition. Therefore, it is extremely important that you carefully monitor your diet and remember a number of nutrients that are especially important for the development of a child’s brain.

Important!

In the first year of life, your baby grows literally by leaps and bounds. In a year, his height doubles and his weight triples! But even more incredible speed of development at this time reaches his brain.

The medulla is laid in the cranium of the fetus already in the first weeks of intrauterine development of the baby. At the tenth week of pregnancy, the baby’s brain is divided into three parts. In a child who was born, the brain is almost no different from the brain of an adult. By twelve months, the final formation of the brain structure is completed. The number of neurons remains approximately at the same level until the end of life. And from birth, a lot of reflexes and skills are embedded in the brain: breathing, sucking, grasping…

From birth, the neurons of the brain exist for the most part independently of each other. The task of the brain during the first 3 years is to establish and strengthen the connections between them. At this time, the cells of the child’s brain create 2 million new connections – synapses – per second! As the child develops, the synapses become more complex: they grow like a tree with many branches and twigs.

The period from birth to three years is the time of the highest brain activity. By the age of three, a child’s brain is already 80% the size of an adult’s brain. The increase in brain volume occurs due to special glial cells: they are necessary for the existence of neurons. Starting from the age of three, a sharp slowdown in the rate of brain development begins, and after six years it almost completely slows down and the formation ends. The abilities of the brain of a six-year-old child practically coincide with those of an adult!

For the harmonious development of the baby’s brain, an environment full of positive emotions and new impressions is needed. Such an environment will make the brain work more actively, stimulate its development. It is in the first three years that the future foundations of health, thinking, various skills, and adaptability to life are laid in the baby. Therefore, it is very important in these first three years to help the formation of the brain. The child should be surrounded by images, sounds, touches, smells. All these are stimuli that are perceived by the brain and help it form faster.

Adherents of the ideas of “early development” – the intensive development of a child’s abilities at an early age (from 0 to 3 years) – pay special attention to this. In their opinion, it is necessary to introduce the baby to various activities as early as possible: develop his speech, draw, sculpt, play musical instruments, etc.

Equally important is the baby’s nutrition. Of particular importance in the development and proper functioning of the baby’s nervous system are long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. These include docosahexaenoic and arachidonic acids (DHA and ARA).

The daily diet for the “future genius” should include DHA and APA of breast milk or baby milk in case of supplementary feeding. Breast milk does not have an exact ratio of these fats, as their presence is highly dependent on the diet of the nursing mother and how much she consumes foods containing them. So, for example, the milk of Japanese mothers has a very high amount of DHA due to the high consumption of seafood, while the concentration of DHA in the milk of American mothers is very low. Also, sources of DHA in the mother’s diet can be, for example, seafood, various vegetable oils, walnuts.