What is Critical Thinking for Kids? Learn How to Think.

Critical thinking is a life skill that can help us beyond the expectation. Learning to think rationally and being informed about happenings around us. Learning to think critically provides you with skills that are helpful across a lifetime.

Developing an essential mindset that can criticize the former practices, interchange and interlinking ideas and information, defending and justifying decisions was also presented by critical thinking.

What is Critical Thinking for Kids?

Critical thinking represents a set of vital life skills that help you throughout your life. As kids are developing brains, learning to think critically is easier than compared to adults. In this phase of becoming a passive listener to an active learner, the human brain undergoes critical development.

Critical thinking empowers growth mindset in children.  It provides the ability to acknowledge new information, make the interaction between former and acquire knowledge. Also, it helps us to develop problem-solving personalities.

As children mostly learn through trial-and-error, making them learn how to think makes them critical learners.  Young children are concrete thinkers and they are motivated to think critically. Parents can encourage them to think logically by wiring them with critical thinking activities for kids.

Teaching Critical Thinking to Children

In today’s world of automation and artificial intelligence, children’s need to analyse, compare, contrast and make sense of information to generate thinking skills. Teaching them critical thinking can be achieved by some activities, games, and exercises.

If you want your child to think critically there is no obvious strategy to support your child’s critical thinking. All you can do is guide them through their thinking process. Letting your child perform their experiment and redefine their theories may be a more appropriate approach towards critical thinking.

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

Here are some tricks to help your child build the foundation of critical thinking:

1. Play-Based Opportunities

As most of the childhood development is dependent on play-based learning, critical thinking can also be tested out this way.  Giving them play-based activity and letting them explore the cause and effect of the conclusion.

Providing them with a particular place and space to a play, letting them question starting with what happens if____?  For example, what happens if I add water to oil? What happens if I touch ice? What happens if I don’t shower/ wash my hands? What happens if I don’t take medicines when I am not well?

Providing open-end opportunities for trial and error processes makes them think more critically.  These open ending opportunities with pretend-play encourages them to see the reaction. Also playing opportunities develop motor skills and sense of surroundings with hands-on experiments. This provides a foundation for critical thinking.

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2. Pause and Wait

Provide an ample amount of time to think and rethink their conclusions. Generating noble responses to attempts of the task is critical but not easy to do.  Take a break and count numbers before stepping in.

Let your kid try to attend to tasks by themself without any adult help. Let them take time, learn at their pace, and help them when needed.  Letting them work out by themselves provides an opportunity to refine their theories, reflect on their thoughts rather than depending on reflexes.

3.Don’t Intervene

As a parent, if you want your child to think critically, ask them an open-ended question, and wait for the response.  Avoid stepping in between the process of completing the task for your child. Observe and analyse their activities and patiently wait till they complete their task.

Letting them navigate throughout the problem by themselves develops executive functioning skills.  If your child can easily do the task, give them a bit of a complex task for them to figure it out. Also if they find it hard to complete provide small clues to reach the potential solution.

Provide them with enough information so they don’t get frustrated over one problem.  If they are taking too much time to respond, try to give them clues that help them to structure their solution. Do not disturb them till you feel they need help with a particular area of the task.

4.Open-end Questions

Avoid teaching them how to do it or automatically giving them answers.  Try to provide them with open ended questions, such as What do you think about____ idea?  What is happening here? These open ended questions help them to think critically also so they are encouraged to ask questions.

After you get the response, don’t try to point out the mistakes or tell them if they are wrong or right. Just extend the conversation with another question. As your child becomes more of a critical thinker you will hear interesting responses from them.

Don’t try to spoon-feed them with your thoughts, let them generate their unique way of thinking. Even if your child’s response doesn’t make sense, try to help them with interesting responses such as, what if we try it out?  Let’s find more information about this or will this work or not? Should we proceed with it?

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5. Hypothesis

This is the essential phase of the completed task. taking some time out to form a hypothesis out of the overall reaction.  Questions such as,  if I do this then what will happen next? Can we replace this, what do you think about it?

Making them think out on the different scenarios of the task and their probabilities. Wait till they predict the result and conclude the situation. Adding layers to their foundational thoughts, extending their possibilities to learn.

6. Encourage to Think in Different Way

Creative problem-solving skills highly depend on critical thinking and involve creative thinking. Asking them questions that generate options for their approaches towards problem-solving tasks, are essential.

They can’t think out of the box unless you show them how to get out of the box. Let them explore ways to reach the common goal, and find the most efficient way to reach there. Provide situations that help them bend their thinking and decision-making process.

There are some situations in which adult help is unavoidable, step in at those times. Also, help them to reflect on their daily task, let them learn from their mistakes.  As they develop more critical thinking skills they will also develop how to verbalize their response.

Teach them that to reach a certain target.  Try to generate new options and let them explore and experiment with them.

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Conclusion

Critical thinking is a vital skill for today’s generation to learn. It surrounds essential skill sets that might be helpful across the lifetime of your child.  Developing a creative thinking mind is not an easy task to perform, but some critical thinking activities for kids can help.

In the era of atomisation and the computer-driven world, thinking critically about problem-solving has a major role. Rather than just being dependent on the gut feelings for a particular event. It scores as an essential life skill needed by 21st-century kids.

In today’s rapidly changing information and technology sector, the world needs creative problem solvers.  Individuals need to be able to perform better than just rote learning methods. If you want to help your kid build the basics of critical thinking to become better problem solvers, the above tips and tricks may guide you.

Computational thinking is one of the critical thinking examples for kids to learn about. Taking time challenges, performing engineering activities and solving puzzles are some of the activities that promote critical thinking.

Letting your kid figure out their way out of the problem. Providing opportunities for play-based activities. Giving them sufficient time to respond, and not disturbing in between the process. Are some common etiquettes for you to follow.

Asking open-ended questions, helping them to create hypotheses, and encouraging them to think differently are some steps you can incorporate to make them more creative with their work. There is no common or obvious structure to follow when you want your kid to learn about thinking.

As a parent, you should be a drone observer for your kid, and step in only when they need adult supervision. As far as they are comfortable with their progress don’t try to change their pace or add confusion.

As long as they achieve their target, try to perk them with their favourite kind of activities.  Let them balance between their play and learning, and take ownership of their learnings. As they become more self-sufficient, they will learn to take responsibility for the actions.

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