A Guide To Honing Your Child's Critical Thinking Skills
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A Guide To Honing Your Child’s Critical Thinking Skills

A Guide To Honing Your Child's Critical Thinking Skills

Pre-schoolers are bombarded with information, images, and challenges every day, whether in school or at home. This makes it crucial for them to know how to evaluate everything so that they are able to form beliefs and opinions of their own. This is where critical thinking skills come in handy.

Critical thinking is an individual’s ability to analyse, evaluate, and imagine information to determine its validity and integrity. It also helps a person develop clear solutions for complex or complicated problems. In fact, critical thinking is an integral part of decision making, goal setting, and problem solving – which are all situations every person faces every day.

What makes critical thinking especially vital for young children is that it can help them better understand other people, the world around them, and even themselves. Critical thinking skills allow young children to deal with obstacles and challenges better.

Additionally, critical thinking enhances one’s creativity, encourages curiosity and fosters independence. This is why children who are taught critical thinking are much more interested in the world around them — they want to know the “why” and “how” behind everything!

Here are 5 ways you can help develop your child’s critical thinking skills.

1. Play with your children.

It is no secret that play is important in early childhood. But did you know that play is also an effective way to practise critical thinking? Playing with your children regularly will help set the foundation of their critical thinking skills and develop them at a young age.

Let your little one play freely with different toys. During free play, a child’s frontal cortex of the brain, which is responsible for problem solving, is stimulated. When you play with your child, neurotransmitter connections are formed in the brain that are directly associated to the development of critical thinking and reasoning skills.

2. Encourage them to solve problems on their own.

The best way to develop critical thinking skills in young children is to allow them to solve problems on their own. Of course, you can still guide them in their decision making, but it would be ideal if they had some sort of say or input.

You could also prompt them to brainstorm three different solutions when faced with a particular problem. Though they might find it challenging in the beginning, with a little support from you, they will eventually learn to come up with viable solutions on their own.

3. Allow them to ask questions.

Encouraging pre-schoolers to ask questions is the key to developing critical thinking as it shows that they are active and curious thinkers. However, instead of answering their queries right away, it could be beneficial to guide them in finding the answers to their own questions. By doing so, you are actually teaching your child how to search for information on their own and evaluate this information to determine what is right from wrong.

4. Practise trial and error.

Part of honing one’s critical thinking skills is making tough decisions. To get your child to carefully think about possible solutions to their problems, practise trial and error with them. That way, they will learn how to think critically about their choices and the possible consequences before making the final decision.

5. Teach them about being open-minded.

Being open-minded indicates having the ability to be objective and evaluate information without bias. This is another crucial factor in being able to think critically. Hence, when your child is faced with a challenge, teach them to not judge or assume before verifying the information at hand.

Conclusion

Being able to think critically is one of the most essential life skills that young children need to learn. In today’s information-saturated society, children must be able to have the necessary skills to thrive.

To help ensure that your child will be able to develop and enhance their critical thinking skills, you should consider enrolling them in a reputable international preschool and childcare in Singapore. Here at Viv’s Schoolhouse, we are equipped with the necessary expertise and experience to nurture our children’s critical thinking, creativity, curiosity and kindness. Our award-winning curriculum is designed to engage every child’s senses through experiential learning, bilingual immersion, and speech and drama classes for kids.

If you have any enquiries, do not hesitate to contact us today!