Top 5 Ways To Exercise Your Child’s Brain!
The cognitive and mental development of your child are important aspects of your child’s development. You as parents, want that your children have good general abilities to adapt adequately as they develop into adulthood and not only improve in scholastic abilities. This is made more obvious because there are more educational and nutritional products which target mental development for children such as memory and intelligence. We have listed a top 5 ways to exercise your child’s brain!
1. Read Everything and Anything
One of the best thing we can feed our brain is knowledge. Reading is still one of the most effective ways for learning new things. There is a big variety of materials you can let your child read other than good books. Magazines, nutritional labels, newspapers, travel itineraries and cookbooks are examples. You can test if they understand what they are reading by letting them summarize what they read. Also letting your child read aloud to you, their grandparents, neighbors or siblings as often as possible. By interacting with them after they have read something, you are engaging them to think, respond, and get creative.
2. Keep your child Active
It is good for kids to play outside, go to the gym, play in the sandbox, ride their bikes or be involved in an organized sports such as Little League or gymnastics because than they are engaging their bodies and imaginations. When kids are playing video games and watching TV they are not, because they are not really using there body. It’s that simple. Physical activity stimulates mental activity, so it’s important to get your kids moving.
3. Play Memory Games
Good memory games are very helpful with keeping your kids focused and they are also fun to do! An example of a great memory game is Concentration. Grab a deck of 52 playing cards and spread them out face down. Match up pairs by memorizing the location of each card. This game is also fun for younger kids, who enjoy cards with their favorite cartoon characters like Dora the Explorer or SpongeBob. If you visit Funbrain.com, you’ll find lots of interesting memory games to play online.
4. Balance All Styles of Learning
There are different types of learning. The ones we use often are visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Most people have one style that is dominant. We all use all three areas in learning, but most of us know that we have one learning style that we use more, a learning style we feel more comfortable with. You can use this information to your child’s advantage when she has to learn new information. For example, when your child is visual, you can use flash cards when having to memorize materials for school. For an auditory child you would record the material on a recording media and let your child listen to it while driving or at any other time repeatedly. For a kinesthetic child you could have your child reenact the material or use some type of movement while reciting the material.
5. Daily Talk Time/Triumphs and Challenges
Nowadays we all are constantly texting, talking and really communicating is getting decreasing. Taking time every day with your child to learn about their triumphs and challenges and sharing yours will greatly improve your child’s communication and conversational skills. Sharing your triumphs and challenges can also help them to learn problem solving skills. Family dinnertime is an perfect time to do this and a great tradition to start. Also reading a book with your child and ask questions about what was happening is a good way to communicate with your child. Discuss the events and also the feelings, not only how the characters were feeling but what your child was thinking and feeling as well. Share your thoughts and feelings as well.
