How to foster cognitive development in early childhood: Play & cognitive development: preschoolers

How to Promote Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Cognitive development refers to how children learn information, obtain knowledge, and connect to the world around them. Various cognitive skills grow and develop as children reach specific developmental milestones. If parents want to enhance their children’s cognitive development, there are plenty of activities they can do with their little ones. Opportunities to engage in active learning can greatly benefit a child’s cognitive development. In this post, we will discuss specific ways you can support your child’s cognitive development in early childhood.

First, let’s examine the reasons why it’s beneficial for parents to promote this type of development with their children.

What is the importance of cognitive development in early childhood?

As children get older, they develop an increased capacity to retain information, think critically, and focus. Cognitive skills enable children to see connections between ideas, understand cause and effect, and develop analytical thinking.

Activities that enrich cognitive development in early childhood

Sing with your child

Sing songs together and listen to songs on YouTube that your child enjoys. Encourage little ones to sing with you. At some point, children will begin singing by themselves. This activity improves word identification and memory.

For example, if you are singing “Old MacDonald”, it will help your child learn the names of animals and the sounds they make.

Music enhances the following cognitive skills: memory, vocabulary, auditory sequencing (the order in which sounds occur), word identification, and information processing.

Ask open-ended questions often

When playing with young children, ask open-ended questions. When children answer these types of questions, it helps them expand their language skills, verbal comprehension, and inferencing.

For example, when little ones are coloring, you might ask what they want to draw a picture of, or which colors they want to use. If children are playing with toy cars, ask where they think the car should go.

Asking open-ended questions can enhance the following cognitive skills:  comprehension, making inferences, inferential reasoning, and vocabulary.

Play make-believe 

When children engage in make-believe activities, they can take on different roles in order to demonstrate what they are learning. As they gain a stronger understanding of other people’s perspectives, it will enrich their cognitive skills and language development.

Additionally, make-believe activities help children learn how to create and follow a plan. It can also help to enhance the development of memory as children repeat themes and actions as they role-play different characters.

Make-believe play enhances the following cognitive skills: cognitive flexibility, problem-solving, understanding different perspectives, language development, and vocabulary.

Visit museums or science centers with your family

Museums and science centers are great places for children to acquire new knowledge. As children hear information and explanations from experts, it can positively impact their cognitive skills.

For example, if your child is interested in space, visit a museum that focuses on astronomy and astrophysics. Children can learn about astronomy, planets, and an array of other objects in outer space. By doing this, children’s visualization skills and logical thinking are enriched, as they can imagine and see things found in outer space.

Visiting museums and science centers enhances the following cognitive skills:  cognitive flexibility, problem-solving, visualization skills, and logical thinking.

Read to your child daily

The more you read books with children, the more opportunities they will have for the enrichment of their cognitive skills. By hearing stories and looking at images, children learn to form a mental picture from the story they hear and practice using their visual memory skills.

Reading to your child enhances the following cognitive skills:  cognitive flexibility, visual memory, and vocabulary.

Let children solve problems independently 

It’s important for us to provide opportunities for kids to solve problems on their own periodically. Cognitive skills improve as children learn to solve problems.

This can enhance the following cognitive skills:  problem-solving, cognitive flexibility, and logical thinking.

Teach children board games that require strategy

Board games, like chess, can enhance children’s logical thinking and problem-solving skills. Play games together and teach your little one about the rules of each game. Cognitive skills are enriched as children gain an understanding of how to play the game.

Playing games enhances the following cognitive skills:  problem-solving, cognitive flexibility, logical thinking, language development (for instructions and strategy), visual memory (for recalling positions and visualizing).

Let children explore the world on their own 

Cognitive skills develop as children learn and discover through self-exploration. You’ll see their skills improve as they absorb new information through touch, smell, taste, sight, and sounds.

Some examples include letting children touch a piece of paper or stick their hands into a bag of beans or rice. Cognitive skills addressed here include tactile sensation and memory.

These activities enhance the following cognitive skills: cognitive flexibility, problem-solving, tactile sensation, and memory.

The Pillars Christian Learning Center promotes various activities that support your child’s cognitive development. For more information about our programs, contact us today.

10 Ways to Promote Your Child’s Cognitive Development – Friendship Circle

BY Sara Peronto

Popular, Therapy Tips

Cognitive development is characterized by the way a child learns, acquires knowledge and interacts with his surrounding environment.   Different cognitive skills are acquired as a child meets certain developmental milestones, but a child of any ability will benefit from activities that promote active learning.  As a parent, you can encourage your child’s cognitive development in the areas of memory, concentration, attention and perception by incorporating simple activities into your everyday routine.

Here are 10 easy ways you can help your child’s cognitive development:

1. Sing-a-longs

Sing songs with your child and encourage him to sing along with you.  Play his favorite songs and music in the house and car regularly and he may eventually start singing along by himself.  This activity helps promote memory and word identification.

2. Identify Noises

Have your child identify noises that he hears throughout the day (i.e. a bird singing, a car horn, running water or the dishwasher).  He will begin to understand how sounds relate to objects in his everyday environment.

3. Practice the Alphabet

Help your child identify letters by singing along to the “Alphabet Song,” reading books about the alphabet and playing with alphabet puzzles.

Here is an example of an easy game to help your child learn his letters:

1. Cut out individual squares that feature each letter of the alphabet written in bright colors.
2. Mix them up and tape them on various surfaces in the house.
3. Go through the alphabet with your child and encourage him to search around the house to find the next letter and tape it to the wall in order.
4. When finished, leave the alphabet letters in order up on the wall until you’re ready to play the game again.

4. Practice Counting

Identify opportunities throughout the day to practice counting.  Count the number of shoes in your child’s closet when he gets dressed or the number of slides on the playground when you go to the park.  You may soon find that you’re counting everything!

5. Practice Shapes and Colors

Identify shapes and colors when interacting with your child.  You can say, “That is a round, blue ball,” when playing in the yard or “That sign is a red octagon” when pulling up to a stop sign.   As he gets older, you can ask him to describe objects to you.

6. Offer Choices

When you can, offer your child choices: “Would you like to wear the brown shorts or the blue shorts?” or “Would you like string cheese or yogurt with your lunch?”  This will help him to feel more independent and learn to make confident decisions that affect his day.

7. Ask Questions

Another way to help your child learn to think for himself is to ask him questions: “Which toy should we pick up first when we clean up the living room? Or “Why is it important to walk down the stairs slowly?”  Asking him questions helps him learn how to problem solve and better understand how his environment works.

8. Visit Interesting Places

Take trips to your local children’s museum, library or farmer’s market to stimulate his curiosity and provide him with “hand on” experiences.  Ask him questions while you explore and listen to his responses and reactions.  These adventures can provide a learning experience for both of you.

9. Play with Everyday Items

Playing with everyday household items is educational, fun and cost effective.  Encourage your child to match various-sized lids to their accompanying pots or have him look in a mirror and point to his nose, mouth, eyes, etc.

10. Offer a Variety of Games

Play a variety of games with your child to encourage problem solving and creativity.   If your child is younger, the two of you can build with blocks and play “Peek-a-Boo.”  As he gets older, you can engage him in board games, puzzles and play “Hide and Seek.”

Sources:

Loehr, Jamie, M.D. and Jen Meyers.  “Activities to Enhance Cognitive Development: 18-24 Months.”  Parents. Web. 21 May 2014.

http://www.parents.com/toddlers-preschoolers/development/activities-for-cognitive-development/#page=3.

“Promoting Healthy Cognitive Development in Your Child.” Childtime Learning Centers. Web. 21 May 2014.

http://www.childtime.com/parent-resources/parenting-articles/promoting-healthy-cognitive-development-in-your-child/.

Vick, Beth. “Promoting Cognitive Development Through Play.” PenfieldBuildingBlocks.org. Penfield Children’s Center. 13 December 2013. Web. 21 May 2014.

http://penfieldbuildingblocks.org/2013/12/promoting-cognitive-development-through-play/

Cognitive development in early childhood

The interaction of a child with an adult serves as a source of formation of the child’s language ability, his ability to speak and communicate using words. Early childhood is a sensitive period for mastering speech. The development of speech goes along two lines: the understanding of adults’ speech is improved and the child’s own active speech is formed.

The following features can be distinguished here.

1. Passive speech in development is ahead of active: the child understands much more words than he can pronounce. First, he understands words-indications, then – words-names, later comes the understanding of instructions and instructions, finally, understanding of stories, and stories related to the things and phenomena surrounding the child are easier to understand.
2. Phonemic hearing is ahead of the development of articulation. The child first learns to hear speech correctly, and then to speak correctly.
3. The active speech of the child is intensively developing. The child’s autonomic speech quickly transforms and disappears. Words that are unusual in sound and meaning are replaced by words of “adult” speech. By the age of three, the active vocabulary reaches 1000-1500 words.
4. The child discovers that each object has its own name. From this moment the child shows a pronounced initiative in the development of the vocabulary. Questions arise: “What is this?”, “Who is this?”.
5. Sentences appear, initially consisting of two or three words, the so-called “telegraphic speech”. Most often, such sentences consist of a subject and its action (“mom is coming”), or an action and an object of action (“give me a candy”, “I want a car”), or an action and a place of action (“dad is there”).
6. At the border of the second and third years of life, the child intuitively “discovers” that the words in the sentence are related to each other, i. e. begins to learn the grammatical structure of speech.
7. By the end of early childhood, the child has mastered almost all the syntactic constructions that are in the language. Almost all parts of speech, different types of sentences are found in the child’s speech.
8. At an early age, the meanings of children’s words develop. There is a transition from the ambiguity of children’s words to the first functional generalizations. The liberation of the word from the object as a result of transfer to other objects and images (i.e. naming different objects with the same word, for example, “clock” – this is a wall clock, and mother’s hand watch, and an alarm clock, and the clock shown in the picture ) creates the possibility of designation: the word begins to act as a carrier of subject content. The child denotes in one word objects that are different in their external properties, but similar in some essential feature or mode of action with them.

The ways and pace of speech development in children at an early age are so diverse that it is unjustified to speak of the existence of any single rigid program for mastering speech. According to psychologists, when a child under two years old has only two or three words in the active dictionary, this is not a cause for concern if he understands the speech of adults, listens to them with interest and learns the names of many things. If the child’s active vocabulary does not grow, and the state of affairs does not change in two to two and a half years, then you need to carefully look at the child, understand why he is silent and help him speak.

V.V. Vetrova identifies the following typical variants of speech difficulties in children two to two and a half years old.

1. Delay at the naming stage. The child can repeat the names of various objects after the adult, but does not speak himself. Often the parents of such children teach them to name objects, but they talk little with them, interact little, do not read. A word that is not included in interaction with others cannot become active.
2. Delay at the stage of emotional communication with an adult . Parents with a child have mutual love: caresses, smiles, a word is superfluous. You need substantive interaction with the baby so that he speaks.
3. Orientation to the objective world. Usually this child is “overwhelmed” with toys, he manipulates them with pleasure, occupies himself, shows physical activity, not striving for interaction. In this case, it is necessary to include the subject in the logic of cooperation with an adult: play together, read books, engage the child in such games where a partner is needed, develop emotional contact with the child, teach him to play actions that are of a “human nature” (feed the doll, feel sorry for the bear and etc.).
4. “Baby” words may interfere with the development of normal human speech . If the parents fulfill all the desires of the child, focusing on his autonomous speech and themselves, communicating with him, speak the “childish” language (“av-av cous-cous bo-bo” instead of “the dog can bite – it will hurt”), then mastering speech slows down.
5. Swiftness of speech development. If a child understands everything, listens with interest, speaks a lot himself, moreover, in detailed correct sentences, with good diction, including complex words in speech and at the same time does not sleep well, cries in his sleep, he has many fears, he is lethargic, capricious, etc. ., therefore, it does not cope with the information. Such children must be limited from unnecessary speech impressions: walk more with them, play, give them the opportunity to communicate with their peers.

Speech is extremely important for the development of other cognitive processes: perception, thinking, memory, attention, imagination. Among all these processes, perception develops intensively at an early age, it dominates all mental functions, influencing their development.

According to L .S. Vygotsky, all mental functions at this age develop “around perception, through perception and with the help of perception.” However, perception itself is far from perfect. A child, perceiving an object, often singles out some one property in it, which he then orients himself to when recognizing the object. The accuracy of auditory and visual perceptions is limited to a small distance.

Children cannot simultaneously perceive an object as a whole and its individual parts (therefore, for example, they can “lose” their mother in a store, being unable to distinguish the mother’s face from a large number of faces: either they carefully study one face, or begin to randomly wander with their eyes over the entire mass of faces, not noticing the “details”).

In addition, the perception of a young child is affectively colored and is closely related to practical actions: the observed objects “attract” the child, causing an emotional reaction and a desire to get them, to do something with them. With a variety of properties of objects (shape, size, color, etc.), the child gets acquainted in the process of practical actions: grasping, manipulating, correlating and instrumental actions.

From correlating, comparing the properties of objects with the help of external orienting actions, the child gradually proceeds to the visual correlation of the properties of objects. The child, performing objective actions, proceeds to visual orientation, for example, selects the desired object “by eye” and performs the action immediately correctly, without preliminary trying it on, or can make a visual choice according to the model, when from two objects that differ in size, shape or color, can pick up exactly the same item that an adult shows (B.C. Mukhina). Thus, the child begins to develop sensory standards: the child can quite accurately determine the shape, size, color of objects, although it is still difficult for him to master the name of these properties.

The memory of a young child has two specific features: it is involuntary (he is not yet able to control his memory: he does not remember himself, but “remembers him”, does not remember himself, but “remembers him”) and direct (the child unable to use any memory aids). The predominant types of memory are motor and emotional.

The thinking of the child in this age period is visual and effective. Since perception dominates in a child, his thinking is limited to a visual situation and develops from practical activity, i.e. he solves all the problems that confront him with the help of practical actions. The child acts with objects, manipulates them and thus grasps the connections between them.

It is during this age period that symbolic thinking appears (the sixth stage in the development of sensorimotor intelligence, according to J. Piaget), the sign function of consciousness begins to form: the child can act “as if”, replacing real objects with substitutes or imaginary symbols (for example, the child acts stick like a spoon or a cube like a cup, i.e. no longer performs the action itself, but only denotes it).

Play and cognitive development at an early age. PsyMag

What is cognitive development anyway?

Cognitive from lat. cognitio – “knowledge” or “knowledge”.

Cognitive development is the changes that occur to a person throughout the life cycle. This is the development of thinking and mental abilities of the child. In particular, processes such as memory, perception and all kinds of thought processes. But these processes, at different stages of life, function differently.

The scientist who developed the theory of cognitive development was Jean Piaget. As the author himself stated, a person can create cognitive abilities by himself through his actions, which were carried out when interacting with the environment.

Piaget studied the development of thinking right up to the moment when it is combined with speech, but at the same time he believed that thinking is built much earlier than it becomes speech.

Since there must be logic in thinking, it should be said that Jean Piaget put forward not just structures of thinking, but logical structures of thinking. Namely, operations.

Operations are mental actions that can be reversible. That is, you can return to the beginning of something that you did by doing the opposite action.

Knowledge – is a process, and knowing means acting in accordance with the knowledge that a person has.

The main mechanisms that can determine the transition of a child from one stage of development to another, Piaget called such clever words: assimilation, accommodation and a word that is understandable to me – balance.

Assimilation is actions with new objects when certain skills and knowledge have already been formed. And actions take place on the basis of this knowledge and skills.

Accommodation is when you want to change your skills and abilities as a result of changing conditions.

Like good and evil, assimilation and accommodation must be in balance. If assimilation dominates over accommodation, then thinking becomes stiff (stiff), and if vice versa, then a delay in mental actions can be noticed in the behavior of children, and problems in learning can be observed in the future.

Piaget describes four stages of intellectual development:

1. Sensorimotor stage (from birth to 18-24 months).

At this stage, the child acquires motor and sensory abilities.

2. Preoperative stage (from 18-24 months to 7 years).

Here the child begins to use speech, can already describe objects and images in words. In fact, he uses these objects and images in the game, in the process of imitation. The only problem is that it is difficult for a child to imagine how others perceive what he observes and sees himself. And to everything else, it is difficult for him to express everything in verbal form.

3. Stage of concrete operations (from 7 to 12 years).

Children can logically explain the actions performed and classify objects according to individual specific features.

4. Stage of formal operations (after 12 years and continues throughout life).

Thinking becomes more flexible, the ability to reason appears, the ability to find solutions to various problems, while having different solutions.

Returning to the phrase that children perceive objects and images in the process of play, namely imitation, let’s talk about what play is and how it is connected with the early age of children.

• play is the leading type of a child’s activity, which determines his mental development, since an imaginary situation is inherent in play;
• it is always connected with the development and education of children’s feelings. The most interesting thing is that the child absolutely honestly experiences everything that he displays in the game. In this case, the game arises on the basis of real life. In the game, the child brings to life the actions of adults or those events in life that interested him;
• from a very early age, the child begins to reproduce some of the actions of adults, which he observes in everyday life. But he wants to do everything exactly the same as they do. He transfers real everyday actions to toy characters;
• the plot game at this age is procedural, since the main interest of the baby is based on the constant repetition of the same game actions. The procedural game does not appear immediately, for a period of early age it goes through several stages;
• if the conditions for the development of this game are favorable, then it reaches its peak in the third year of life;
• speech plays an important role, which gives the child the opportunity to better comprehend what he is doing, build dialogues, plan further actions;
• the game helps to maintain the child’s mental balance, provides a sense of comfort, gives joy and pleasure;
• game goals for a child are the goals that an adult sets for him.;
• accepting the game goal set by an adult, the child begins to independently realize it. First, the adult performs a game action with respect to the child himself, then the roles change;
• taking on a role is when you can imagine yourself as someone else. In children, this appears by the age of three, if appropriate practice is carried out.

“Transformation into another” – the first and most important step in the formation of a story-based role-playing game.

There is a sequence of transformations:

1. Animals and birds known to children and attractive to them (cat, sparrow).
2. Objects interesting for kids, primarily moving (locomotive, airplane).
3. Adults whose profession has characteristic external attributes (doctor, cook).

In fact, it is in the game that the whole process of cognitive development, described at the beginning of the article, takes place. The whole point of these games is that they give the child pleasure. And the emotions that are received as a result of new play actions will encourage the child to repeat them in relation to toys. This means that they will contribute to the transition from one stage of cognitive development to another. Over time, the story game goes a long way of development, becomes more independent and creative. And cognitive processes are becoming more and more perfect.

As a conclusion, we can say that play is the most important thing in a child’s life. The process of the games themselves takes place imperceptibly for him in practical activities. Thanks to these games, he improves various abilities, masters various roles and topics. The game eliminates various children’s fears and also, games are activities that can make any walk much more interesting and useful for the child. And I would like to give some tips on organizing games to help the kid move from the level of object play to the level of role-playing:

1. At the initial stages, you can limit yourself to only the introductory part of the role-playing game, that is, to ensure entry into the character. Don’t try to play the entire game.
2. During the second part of the game – the incarnation and disclosure of the image, it is necessary to call the children foxes (squirrels .