10 ways to develop thinking skills in children
(Mohsina Mukhtar, Lahore)
• Give children choices in their daily routine.
• Make available opportunities to encourage creativity (through art, music,
retelling stories and creating new ones).
• Build up their social abilities through the learning about the neighborhood
and the city.
• Provide many manipulative different materials of daily life which encourage
the maturity of problem solving skills.
• Ask the children for their opinions. Make charts with their predictions and
their opinions and reread them often.
• Enhance their Mathematical skills. Provide small group and individual
activities involving counting sets and adding or subtracting; provide them the
opportunities to manipulate the different materials which encourage classifying
(by size, color shape, general classes like animals or plants.
• Provide science experiments and introduce concepts about the environment to
help them make sense of it.
• The ability to read is a crucial skill for learning, and if a child loves
reading, He/she will become more skilled at it. Read daily at least one story to
the child.
• Talk to the child about what is reading and why. Ask open-ended questions
(questions which encourage children to think.).
• Build language skills (listening, speaking reading and writing through
conversations with adults and each other, reading stories, learning nursery
rhymes, singing etc…