6 Activities To Spark Remembering And Reasoning Skills In A 24-30 Month Old Child
By doing deeper thinking games and in-depth activities, your child can build sharper thinking skills each day. Your toddler will enjoy showing you and their peers what they know and can do.
1. Playing Texture Feeling Games
This game involves using the sense of touch and memory. Challenge your child by using new textures to help spark deeper thinking, discovery, and learning. Some ideas of textured things to use are pasta, sandpaper, bubble wrap, foil, sponge, beans, velvet, hard cleaning pads, fake fur, satin, felt, tissue paper, buttons, and feathers. This game can also be adapted using smell bottles or tasting different fruits and then guessing them.
The three steps
Glue different textures onto 5 square pieces of cardboard.
When dried, lay the cardboard-textured squares in a straight line.
Ask your child to close their eyes, feel each square, and say how they feel.
2. Reading And Analyzing Books
1 Reading books with your child can foster conversations, provoke deeper thinking, and help them learn new words as they read aloud. Choose books that have 6-9 pages, realistic pictures, 5-6 word sentences, repetitive words, multicultural images, images of everyday items, and a well-constructed end lesson. When reading with your child, let them choose the story.
Let your child be a storyteller
Encourage your child to create their own stories. Ask them open-ended questions to get them thinking, What is going to happen next?
Synthesizing while reading
Combine previous knowledge of things that your child knows with new information when reading books. Give your child a chance to share their understanding, likes, and dislikes of the story.
3. Playing Memory Games
Thinking games
Create fun thinking and reasoning games that help your child practice using their memory skills. Trivia games, guessing games, clue games, matching games, hide-and-find games, easy card games, and missing games can help boost brain skills.
Pretend play games
Games and opportunities where your child can engage in pretend play can help build more thinking and testing out different roles. 2 Children use pretend play to fulfill their egocentric wishes, which the real world does not yet provide. During pretend play, children mainly assimilate the world to their ego, which means that they subsume objects under known action schemata’’ (Jaggy& Ann-Kathrin, 2010, p.10).
Social games
Encourage your child to play with other children, groups, people from different cultures, and family members. Do this by regularly exposing your child to social environments, opportunities such as playdates, trips, visits, the park, walks, or family night interactions. Please also expose your child to people who look different than them, talk to your child positively about other cultures, read books with varying tones of skin, model not being racist, and find ways to try different foods so that your child will not act or look so terrified when they do meet other ethnicities.
Social event ideas for your toddler
Playing outside with their friends.
Doing little trips to the zoo, aquarium, museum, library, or supermarket.
Doing an art or cooking class together.
Doing a long-term science project together.
Playing on a community sports team might help your child develop more teamwork, listening, concentration, and cooperation skills.
4. Playing The Fruit Tasting Game
This game is a fruit-guessing game to help your child work on using their senses, memory, and focus. Please give your child enough time to think about the answers.
How to play
Go shopping with your child and pick out five fruits.
Wash, cut them, and place them on paper plates in a row on a table.
Encourage your child to choose a fruit, taste it, and describe its taste.
Keep repeating until your child has tasted all five fruits.
Open-ended questions that parents can ask in this game
‘‘What colour is this fruit?”
‘‘What is the name of your fruit?”
‘‘Is this fruit sweet or sour?”
‘‘What country do you think this fruit comes from?”
‘‘Do you like this fruit? If not, why?”
‘‘Does this fruit have seeds? If so, what colour are they?”
5. Exploring Brain Pushing Toys
Toys and materials that help strengthen and challenge your child's pre-existing thinking skills are good for them to be exposed to daily. These types of toys will develop your child's sense of manipulation, thinking processes, ideas, limits, openness, problem-solving, and analytical thinking.
Choose toys that
Add a combination of more complex and current-level skills.
Have an assortment of open-ended art materials such as paints, markers, different brushes, pastel, textured fabrics, crayons, or play-dough.
Show multicultural people with different jobs.
They are found in nature.
6. Doing Cooking And Helpful Activities
Cooking
2Inviting your child to help in the kitchen is an excellent way for them to get hands-on learning, realize things for themselves, and see different things happen. Cooking can teach your child how to focus better, work with others, follow through, and practice patience. Your child can see how cooking can be transformed into benefits by eating what was cooked (Gerson et al., 2016). Do go over a few safety reminders with your child.
things that your child could do in the kitchen
Wash fruits and vegetables.
Carry unbreakable light items to the table.
Tear leafy vegetables.
Mix and pour things.
Dry unbreakable things after being washed.
Use a child-size broom to sweep things up.
Help to wipe down surfaces.
Spread butter and other soft toppings.
Assist with kneading dough.
Counting things.
Helping around the house
Find ways for your child to help around the house; children love to help and will see this as a way to boost their abilities and self-esteem vs. work (Jaggy & Ann-Kathrinthis, 2020).
Home tasks are meant to be fun
Tasks should not be super complex.
Tasks should not have a completion time limit applied.
Tasks should be at your child’s current level and skill abilities.
Let your child choose their task.
Phase home task as a ‘‘helpful task’’.
Provide child-sized tools for your child to use. For example, a child-size broom and dustpan, a cut piece of cloth, or a stool to reach the sink to help with the dishes.
Helpful tasks such as sweeping, folding, assisting in the kitchen, putting forks or spoons on the table, wiping down a table, and helping wash the plates. Putting away cans, carrying something light from the car, or tidying up their closet are great ideas for toddlers of all ages.
Strouse &Ganea. (2017,5,16). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5432581/
Gerson et al. (2016, 3, 17). https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12142