Critical Thinking Activities for Kids: Train Your Brain to Grow Deeper Roots

Developing critical thinking is essential for further growth.  But why does it matter? Children do not have the experience to rely on while making decisions and making them dependent on natural reflexes.

If they do not learn how to think outside the box, they would not be able to use their critical thinking skills in future.  Also, they have to depend on someone else for their decisions. Coaching your kid about how to think and make sensible decisions is important to survive the challenges in future.

Also, Read – Teaching Critical Thinking to Children: Games, Activities, and Books

Hence developing critical thinking for kids is essential. Some activities, games and books help them to think creatively. Some of them are collected as follows.

Critical Thinking Activities for Kids

1. Creativity

Encouraging them to draw a scene, or engaging them in artistic activity. Also making them explain about characters of the story or picture presented to them. Also making them present their thoughts through their skills of singing, dancing or drawing develop critical thinking.

The above activities artistically support critical thinking. More complex pieces of art showcase lead to more critical thinking creativity. It is the main reason why art is more valued.

Also, Read – Do you Think Children Should Study Art at School? Art as Medium for Education

2. Sorting Games

Classification and sorting games are great for practising logical reasoning. Asking your kid to classify a list of animal objects, based on shape, size, colour. sorting activities develop an increased understanding of similarities and differences across groups.

3.Puzzle and Brain Teasers Games

Games such as  Jigsaw, Tic Tac Toe, maize or cardboard puzzles help them to brainstorm solutions. With these activities, they learn to plan their strategy of their own. A dedicated family hour will be enough to make it more engaging.

4. Pretend Play

Make them aware of real-world problems such as global warming/ waste management. Ask them to think of the solutions. These kinds of pretend playing activities provide a deep understanding of the environment and self-responsibilities.

They also get motivated to find solutions and implement them. Just as how segregation of waste impacts the total generation of waste. How to reduce it? Or how to follow a sustainable lifestyle that minimizes global warming?

5. Block Brainstorming Activities

Let them get creative with blocks. These blocks can be anything, lego city parts, sponge parts, wooden pieces, toilet roll tubes can work well too. These activities drive their imagination, and restructuring and balancing the parts help them develop engineering skills.

Also, Read – How do Children Learn to Think? Developing Critical Thinking Among Children

6. Reasoning

Asking questions and letting them think about the answer. Counter questioning them helps them with reasoning skills, as they defend their stand. Their metacognitive skills help them to find flaws in the argument and help them to tune their responses.

7. Cause and Effect Activities

What if Experimental activities include cause and effect learnings? Provide safe environment and exploration tools, let them make small discoveries. Such expeditions teach good observation skills and build strong experience.

8. Guessing Games

Guessing activities with shallow hints help them with reasoning skills. Guessing animals with sounds, identifying songs with tunes, etc.

9. Recognising and Recalling Activities

To think critically, an individual needs to recall and recognise the past learnings key information.

Activities such as mind squeeze, trivia, wordplay, transformation, what’s up, what’s down are some of the games that you can play.

10 Time Capsule

It helps kids to gather key ideas about literature. A simple activity to make them more creative with words. Give them characters, place and conditions of the story and let them wander in a world of imagination.

11. Distinguishing and Visualising Activities

These activities sharpen the skills of identifying important, less important and unimportant data of a child. Triangle challenges, tricky twins, real estate, and origami are some of the gaming activities that can help them distinguish between information given to them.

12. Direction and Classifying Activities

To make them comfortable with directions, these activities may help. Ability to follow directions help them with clarity of the process. Classification of information helps them transfer given information in order format making it more organised.

Quickdraw, wrong rhymes, are we there yet? Save yourself, prime time numbers, scrambled sentences are some of the gaming activities. These activities encourage them to observe, organise the information and think aloud.

13. Sequencing and Predicting Activities

Ability to sequence the details of the given information and predict the possibilities are important stages of critical thinking. Palindrome challenge, building pyramids, survival game, Happy birthday, Nile numbers are some of the activities that employ sequencing skills.

These activities provide opportunities to use prior knowledge and context clues to find out the solution. A small group activity can bring more variety of responses.

14. Inferring and Drawing Conclusions

These activities can be performed as an independent activity or Incorporated with different activities.  We gather information around surroundings, through body language, sounds, and visual clues and reflect them in behaviour.

This type of activity strengthens the use of multisensory clues and intelligence in making inferences and drawing conclusions.  That’s funny, surf and turf, constant confusion, make a wish: these are some of the activities that help with inferring and conclusion skills.

15. Analysing Activities

Asking a demo tricky problem may involve math questions, tongue twister or any language puzzle. Then ask them to find out the possible solution. Point out the fact that a good way to solve any problem is to analyse it thoroughly. These analytical skills for kids are essential to developing sensible solutions to the problem.

Puzzle pattern, scavenger hunt,  odd couples, divide and conquer, riddle me this, amazing analogies are of the analytical thinking activities to develop analysing skills.

Also, Read – Science Activities for 5 Years Old Kids: Make Science Fun For Kids

Conclusion

Today’s kids will inherit this rapidly changing world, where they have to examine, interpret and apply the information they acquired. Developing essential problem-solving skills require thinking creatively and critically.  Solving unconventional problems requires a more organised and complex thought process.

Problem-solving skills strongly attach to critical thinking. Developing critical thinking in younger children is easier than the adult individual.  Although it’s not an easy task to follow around, the above activities can help your child to develop critical thinking skills.

Although if you make them engaged with the above activities, you have to navigate their progress and observe the changes to make it more effective. Some activities surcharge cause-effect activities, reasoning activities, analysing activities, sequencing and predicting activities that required adult help to perform.

Hopefully, you found this article informative, please share your view on the same by commenting in the box below.