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Article - Cognitive Skills

Cognitive skills are the intellectual skills to analyse and understand new ideas, making sense of things, fitting new ideas into what we already know. This enables learning, reasoning and creative problem solving.

Strong cognitive skills developed in the early years help children become confident and independent learners.

Terms that we use when describing activities that develop cognitive skills include:

  • Discovering
  • Sorting
  • Remembering
  • Evaluating
  • Assessing
  • Interpreting
  • Imagining
  • Understanding
  • Thinking
  • Predicting
  • Testing

A sense of adventure in learning is an important part of life-long successful learning. Freedom to experiment, play with ideas, use trial and error, and just "see what happens" fosters a creative, analytic approach to learning and strong cognitive skills.

Fear of failure takes away the freedom to experiment. Obviously too much criticism can make children afraid to experiment, but sometimes too much praise from adults for getting things right, can also change the focus from the puzzle at hand to the child's "performance". Sometimes children can become expert at "jumping through hoops."

You can avoid this by looking with the child at the activity. Monitor your comments and questions. Instead of saying "What you did is right/not right or good/bad", think and say "What was it that made that happen" and "What would happen if..."

Toys and activities that can encourage cognitive skills include:

  • Puzzles
  • Blocks and Bricks
  • Art activities
  • Woodwork
  • Water play
  • Sand pits
  • Books
  • Play dough and Clay

Ideas for Activities

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