Learning to think critically may be one of the most important skills that today’s children will need for the future. In today’s global and rapidly changing world, your children need to be able to do much more than repeating a list of facts: your little champ needs to be critical thinkers who can make sense of information, analyze, contrast, compare and generate higher-order thinking skills.
EXERCISE TO IMPROVE CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS
I am not talking about whether there is any strategy to teach your child how to think critically. Our role is to ask sometimes open-ended questions to guide the thinking process of your child. Allow your child to experiment and refine her theories on what causes thinking to happen.
For developing or helping your child to build a foundation of critical thinking you have to provide him the opportunities to play, offer your child ample time to think, attempt a task. Don’t intervene immediately.
Try to ask him open-ended questions, rather than answers to the questions your child raises to you, help him think critically by asking questions in return: “What is your point of view? What ideas do you have?”. Respect his responses whether in your point of view that was correct or not. You could support him by saying, “yah! That’s interesting, tell me why you think so.” Or by saying, “How would you solve this problem? what’s going in your mind?”
By allowing your child to think differently, you’re helping him to develop their creative problem-solving skills.
“Whatever you choose,
Do it fully with a passion and
child-like enthusiasm”
PROMOTE CHILDREN’S INTEREST
When your child is deeply vested in any topic or pursuit, they are more engaged and willing to experiment. The process of expanding their knowledge brings about a lot of opportunities for critical thinking, so encouraging this activity helps your child invest in their activity of interests.
Always try to avoid teaching your child to do any task in one certain way, and one way only. It’s worth teaching kids early on about biases. When your kid understands how desires influence their judgment, they learn how bias works and do they avoid it.
“Every child is gifted.
They just unwrap their packages
at different times.”
