Make Your Toddler Smarter Before Daycare
Life long cognitive growth happens when children have: time to explore, discovery space and usage of open-ended materials. Thinking will be provoked, pretend play and problem solving skills will arise
1. Provide Thought-Provoking Toys
These types of toys, also known as manipulative toys, force reasoning and thinking through problems to achieve an outcome. Thought-provoking toys are open-ended, unstructured, used in various ways, child-led, create imagination, and offer little challenges. It is essential that your child has a few toys that challenge their cognitive stage, thus helping to push them to develop their following intellectual stage sequence and in quiring healthy brain stressors. Doing this can help expose your child to the building blocks of future resiliency skills.
Tips when choosing toys to keep your child's attention.
Find toys that your child has expressed some form of interest in.
Provide toys with repetitive actions such as pulling apart, pushing buttons, pressing up and down, and opening/closing movements.
Get items that spark problem-solving, repetition, manipulative movements, failure, and success.
More toys that spark creativity, role-playing, pretend play and building practical skills and thinking.
Find toys and materials with realistic-looking characters, different ethnicities, and similarities in everyday functions to those your child also performs.
Get items and toys that help build independence and freedom of expression, spark different emotions, and are fun for your child.
Get various materials that your child can use independently or with someone else.
Tips when choosing toys to build your child’s imagination.
Get primarily real-looking items to help more imagination and pretend play to happen.
Choose toys that help stimulate self-talking, different voices, tones, roles and language to take place.
Get toys and materials that allow your child to show their creativity and thinking process.
Choose open-ended materials that your child likes so they can stay focused longer and enter the stages of play.
2. Develop Critical Thinking Skills
Play communication driving games.
The Inspector game. This is a language building game, pretend you are an inspector and ask your child questions using only the 5 W’s. Such as “Where, What, When ,Who and How”.
Name this toy game. This is a memory recalling game that requires focus and recollection. Start the game by reviewing the names of 3 toys before covering them. Then, ask your child to name the toys one by one as you show them. More toys can be added as your child gets better at this game.
What am I used for game. This is a problem solving game where your child has to make connections of objects and their usage. Take turns pointing out object within the home and ask your child “what the objects are used for”.
Scavenger hunt. This is a observation building game, you can do the scavenger hunt outside or inside. This type of game can also help your child develop their patial awareness skills as they try to find the hidden toys.
3. Model more interpersonal skills.
Daily try to model to your child how building positive social relationships with others, working together, listening to others and being respectful looks. Though the actions of modeling your child can observe you and thus learn these socially acceptable skills. You can also teach their skills through: role-playing, doing hobbies, reading books, watching movies, having talks with your child, or doing puppet play. Other important life kills such as: not giving up, being positive, being independent, always trying your best and loving self are great to model on a daily basic so that your child can continue building these skills as they become older.
4. Playing with Blocks Daily
Doing any form of construction activity can help your child build their imagination, form creativity, learn new lanuage, turn-taking skills and problem-solving skills. Block materials are a cheep but effective way to fosters many parts of the brain for new learning. Blocks can be wooden, plastic, sticks, Legos, boxes, shapes or any kind of stackable material.
Building and constructing things from scratch is great for developing memory recognition, pattern recognition, and cause-and-effect skills. Open-ended building materials create trial-and-error processing, decision-making, and exploration of symbolic play. 1 "A little creativity combined with basic materials can stimulate play and facilitate a young child's development across all domains" (Guyton, p.2). Parents can partake in parallel play by building close to their children.
Essential skills learned with Blocks.
Stacking. This can be done with any kind of blocks. Stacking can be done upwards, sideways, or any way your child chooses.
Sorting. Blocks can be grouped into easy colors or shapes. Adding toys such as farm animals, dinosaurs, multicultural people, cars, or sea animals can expand the play.
Counting. Start by counting the blocks with your child. Counting can also be learned by listening to or singing fun number songs. Songs include Five Little Monkeys, Five Little Pumpkins, Five Little Ducks, Two Buckle My Shoe, One Little Block, Five Speckled Frogs, Four Little Blocks, and Ten in a Bed.
Finger usage. Stacking, knocking down, picking up, and dumping wooden blocks can help build fine motor skills. In addition, the repetition of hand movements will help your child strengthen their eye-hand condonation and finger dexterity skills.
Imagination. Block building allows your child to use their creativity, pretending skills, and vision. Remember to give your child enough floor space and time to make their ideas come to life.
5. Have Quality Together Time
Having meaningful interactions with your child can be done throughout the day. Together time is when you and your child play together, have social interactions, cuddle, learn from each other, talk together, and have loving interactions. Parents should act as play partners, supporters, and active listeners during these joint interactions with their toddlers.
Have cooperative talks
Give pauses and chances for your child to talk.
Build on your child’s ideas by asking open-ended questions.
Give time for your child to come up with their answers and ideas.
Have opportunities for success
Suggest additional toys and materials that can add richness and provide discoveries to your child’s current play.
Challenge your child's thinking.
Listen, be attentive and let your child take the lead in their play.
Give room for your child to partake in repetition.
Have opportunities to build reasoning skills
Encourage your child to tell stories.
Provide space for your child to test out roles through dramatic play.
Give your child space to play.
Challenge viewpoints by asking open-ended questions.
Provide open-ended toys that challenge the mind.
6. Bring on The Arts and Crafts
Dramatic and pretend play
Several studies have been done on how pretend play guides cognitive development. For example, a well-known philosopher, Vygotsky, noticed that “in play, a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself” (Jaggy, Ann-Kathrin, 2010, p.7). To create more richer play experiences do these addition 4 ideas.
Add an assortment of dress-up clothing, hats, shoes, bags, scarves, and accessories for your child.
Provide recyclable objects, loose parts, and as many realistic, safe objects as possible.
Have a dramatic space within your home with a play kitchen set, stove, fridge, and sink.
Add plastic dishes, a cash register, a telephone, books, paper, markers, and other open-ended materials that might be fun.
Musical play
Each day, listen to music and sing at home; this can help boost your toddler’s mood and creativity. In addition, music is known to help spark the brain's right side significantly.
When singing, choose songs that have the repetition of words or actions.
When singing, choose songs that have fast lyrics.
When singing, sometimes add some shakers.
When singing, choose songs that have rhymes.
When singing, choose songs that spark coordination movements of the mouth and the body.
7. Challenge New Thinking
It is important to have daily conversations with your child where you can ask them open-ended thinking questions and listen to them. Patisapating in give and take conversations is one of the parts that make up healthy relationships.
Do also offer a few toys that create challenges for your child this can help them in learning new skills. Challenging toys should:
have a mixture of hard and easy tasks and movements to achieve.
create experience where your child can have both failure and success.
create chances where your child’s efforts can be seen by them.
give enough time and space to your child so that they can work at their own pace, comfort and speed.
create mild cognitive stress in the brain as your child goes through the process of trying/failing/trying again. This helps build new abilities, emotions and cognitive performances.