Raghav Himatsingka, co-founder, Raising Superstars, explains how simple activities can help improve your child's cognitive skills and critical thinking.
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Parents these days often struggle to limit their kids' screen time.
Experts caution that excessive screen time can harm children's attention span, social skills, and physical well-being. The early years of a child's life are crucial for cognitive development.
How can parents support their child's brain development without depending on technology?
Here are five screen-free activities that are both entertaining and good for your child's mind.
1. The Art of Storytelling
Reading to your child from infancy helps them develop good language and cognitive skills.
Even before children can express themselves verbally, the art of storytelling develops creativity and imagination.
Reading exposes them to new words and sentences, which eventually aids in the development of language skills.
Benefits
Listening to fairy tales and adventure stories helps children focus, control their imagination, and predict various outcomes.
These activities help develop cognitive skills such as memory and reasoning. Even sensory books can stimulate curiosity through touch and feel.
Engaging children by asking questions about the characters or what they expect to happen next can encourage critical thinking.
It is important to make reading a daily ritual. Even 10 to 15 minutes a day can make a significant impact on your child’s cognitive development.
2. Building Blocks and Puzzles
Games like building blocks and puzzles are very effective in enhancing their motor skills, problem-solving skills, and hand-eye coordination.
When children construct puzzles, they understand balancing, different shapes, and the spatial understanding.
Benefits
These creativity-led activities help children focus, use reasoning, and experiment with solutions. They even learn to adapt and try again, if their one method fails, or they make a mistake.
Experts suggest to avoid frustration, choose age-appropriate puzzles or blocks.
Allow children to experiment with different problem-solving methods and avoid offering them help too quickly.
3. Pretend Play
Pretend play or role-playing, allows children to imagine and experience life situations way before their time.
They develop important complex social skills, problem-solving skills, and high-order thinking skills, whether it's a simple tea party or play house or any imaginative occupation.
Benefits
Knowing how to read social cues, recognise and regulate emotions, negotiate, take turns, and engage in a long-term mutually beneficial activity is no easy task.
Experts suggest providing props or costumes, but also allowing your child to direct the whole thing. You'll be astonished how much they learn just by telling their own stories.
4. Outdoor Walks
Spending time with nature improves your physical health along with improving your cognitive growth.
Since nature has so much to offer, all things that can be seen, felt or heard offer a multisensory experience to children while they engage with their environment. It not only helps in building their observational skills but also makes them curious.
Benefits
Outdoor activities engage the brain by stimulating curiosity.
Children are inherently intrigued about what they observe, which encourages them to learn more about the world around them and improves their problem-solving ability.
Walking around the neighbourhood or in a nearby park can become a learning opportunity.
While doing so, you can ask questions about colours, shapes, or sounds to engage your child's observational skills.
5. Art and Craft
Every renowned artist was once a child who found their creative release in a form of art which helped them improve their cognitive growth.
A blank slate is like an open canvas where children can express themselves.
Activities like painting, moulding clay, DIY craft and sketching will encourage children to showcase their creative skills.
Benefits
When children sketch, paint, or sculpt, their motor skills and problem solving skills are in full motion. They learn colour selection, texture control, imagination and so much more.
The Take Away
Children are born curious and are always asking questions about their surroundings.
When you distract them from digital devices, their ability to observe and communicate independently improves.
When they observe the surroundings, explore, and interact with them, it enhances their communication. Children are able to express better, and learn problem-solving skills.
Each of the activities listed above improves distinct aspects of cognitive development.
As parents, it is critical to assist your child through these experiences and make them a part of their daily routine.
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