Activities to Learn at Home!

This week as you work with your child on their curriculum, you may want to focus on your child’s ability to think critically.  Critical thinking is important in each area of the curriculum, whether your child is working on mathematics, science, language arts, history, physical education, foreign language, or fine arts.  Here are some ideas to help you work with your child to improve his or her critical thinking skills.

Ask your child to identify similarities in various objects in the room.  Take turns choosing two or three objects in the room. The items may not appear to have anything in common, like a picture and a tennis shoe.   Your child could say that both the picture and the shoe have body parts: the people in the picture have heads, arms, legs and more, while the shoe has a heel and tongue.  Your child may focus on the colors in the picture and in the shoe, for example, the people in the picture all have something white on and the shoe has white stripes.  You may include preschoolers in this critical thinking activity.

Children like learning from fairy tales.  Whether your child is able to read a fairy tale, or she listens to you read, she can increase her ability to think critically through this activity.  Motivate your child to edit a well-known fairy tale through the opinion or voice of another individual’s view.  For example, in the story of Little Red Riding Hood, your child could tell the story through the voice of the wolf.  He or she could give various details and new information that would help the wolf look like the good guy, rather than the big bad wolf.

Most of us have played Connect Four, Risk, checkers, chess, Chinese checkers, or other strategic games.  These games are not only challenging, but they build critical thinking skills.  When you play these games with your child you can help them process some of the thinking skills they are learning.  You may help them learn to look two or three moves ahead.  You may also want to introduce your child to singular strategy games, like solitaire, Rubik’s Cube, and Sudoku.

By supporting your child as he or she builds his or her critical thinking skills, your child will become more successful in his or her core curricular areas.  As you help your child work on academics, make sure to check in regularly with their teacher’s websites, the Columbia School District Live Feed on the myeagles.org website, and your individual school site.  If you have questions about Columbia School District, email me at Pamela.Campbell@myeagles.org or call 5162905747.