Developing Early Thinking Skills
Developing Skills for Learning Through Early Years Play
There are so many opportunities for early learning around your home, in your usual daily activities and any safe opportunities you have for social distancing time outside in your community.
The nursery environment tries to provide as many opportunities for a range of play experiences to develop what we call the ‘cognitive skills’ (thinking and problem-solving skills) that underpin learning for your whole life.
More specifics can be found below if you would like some ideas. Just don’t feel guilty about having fun with your child and being silly together!
Self-Regulation
This skill is about your child beginning to understand that their body movements, attention and focus are under their own control. Traditional party games such as musical bumps/statues develop this skill, as does playing with a ball or bean bag quickly or slowly, or how high or low they are to throw. It’s about making sure your child follows a rule about how they control their body and or focus. It’s an emerging skill, that can become more complicated as your child gets older. Exercises such as yoga and deep breathing also develops these essential skills. Here are some other simple activity ideas to promote self-regulation:
Self-regulation Games.pdfMove like Animals EY Activity.pdfLooking and Listening Carefully
This is connected to self-regulation above, and focuses your child to carefully look at items, it helps build skills for the skill of comparison below too! It’s about encouraging your child to track an item visually. Classic dot-to-dot, and colouring books help develop this skill. As does doing simple puzzles and shape boards. Make sure you direct your child to look at distinctive features that can help them work it out.
Using Prior Knowledge
This helps your child make links between their experiences and learn from previous attempts at tasks. You just need to ask your child” when have we done something like this before?” Or ask if they can “remember what happened when _____”. Make the connections between activities and share them with your child.
Role-Taking
This helps your child learn that people have different views on different things, depending on where they are located or how they feel. Children start out thinking everyone sees what they see and wants what they want. Encouraging children to use their imagination, play different roles, dress-up or use magazines, stories and cartoons to discuss emotions and feelings.
Sequencing
This is a key skill for numeracy later in life, but also literacy, time-management and organisation. Activities that help children make predictions of what comes next, patterns and ordering things the right way. You can get a child to copy a simple song, dance or clapping routine. You can build this skill naturally into most art activities or standard household activities - even making toast for breakfast!
Comparison
This is about helping children understand similarities and differences between objects. Talk about what makes items the same or different? Sizes, colours, function or what it’s made from. Sorting socks or matching shoes are both simple tasks that develop this skill naturally in the home.
Categorisation
This is about how to sort and organise items, thoughts and ideas. This develops the skill of creating ways of organising our learning into different categories and making connections between them. This is essential for when children are older with more complex learning – we must be efficient in how we store and categorise our learning. At the early level it builds from the previous skill of comparison and it can be easily taught from sorting anything in your home – laundry, plates, shopping, tidying away toys! Please find a more detailed example of a Categorisation game for young people here:
Things that go together game.pdfBeing Precise & Accurate
This is developing the basic skill of measuring and how sometimes we need to be exact. Any activity or game that gets children thinking about measuring and how you can measure in different ways. How many cups of flour does the recipe need? How many scoops of mud fills the bucket? How many plates does the table need for our lunch?
Recognising
This is the skill where the child can recognise and identify what makes something different or unique. For example, what makes an orange an orange as opposed to a pineapple? This builds on the skills of comparison that we talked about above. Just asking and answering questions develops this skill. Looking at the world around you, in your home, outside, reading library books, or watching animations together.
Activities to further develop thinking skills
Finally, here are some further tips for how to develop your child’s thinking and learning from everyday experiences and activities, and some ideas around how to develop your child’s imagination and creative thinking:
Everyday experiences and creative thinking.pdf