Learning to think critically may be one of the most important skills that children today will need for the future in today’s global and rapidly changing world. Children need to be able to do much more than repeat a list of facts. They need to be critical thinkers who can make sense of information. They need to be able to analyze, compare, contrast, make inferences, and generate higher-order thinking skills.
There are different strategies to support and teach your child how to think critically as a parent. Your role may sometimes be to ask open-ended questions to guide the thinking process. In other cases, it may be more appropriate to allow your child to experiment and refine their theories on what causes things to happen.
Here are some tips and ideas to help children build a foundation for critical thinking.
1. Provide Opportunities for Play
Testing how things work informally is crucial to developing critical thinking. During play, the children can explore cause-and-effect. By Providing indoor and outdoor space for playing, you provide open-ended opportunities for your child to do different things and see their reactions. These hands-on experiences provide an integral foundation for later abstract critical thinking.
2. Enhance Their Reading Comprehension Skills
Helping your children develop their reading comprehension skills is a critical first step to becoming capable and enthusiastic readers. Kids need to develop and improve their ability to distinguish between what they understand and what they do not about a statement, paragraph, or book. This skill is imperative so that you can help them practice and figure out ways that can help them improve this critical foundational skill.
Read Related Blog: Why Can’t I read for Long and how to fix it?
3. Ask Questions
Allowing your child to ask and answer questions about what they have read is a great way to think actively. Children can show that they have mastered the ability to understand what they have read and interpreted. In addition, it gives them the ability to demonstrate their critical thinking skills.
4. Connecting the Dots
Your child needs to have the ability to make connections when reading or maybe playing a game. By working with them and asking questions, you prop them to practice their critical thinking skills. It also lets them figure out how one paragraph in a book can relate to another. The practice of these skills can help them predict how a story might end. This instills the ability to size up a situation and make a critical analysis of potential outcomes.
- Read the Newspaper together
Pick out a few articles in the local newspaper and read them together. You can also have them look for hints or clues to see if the article is trying to sell them something. Double-check facts together to show them how to use analysis and critical thinking skills.
- Solves Riddles
Read some riddles to your kids and practice solving them together. This teaches your children to analyze information.
- Pause and Wait
Offering your child ample time to think, attempt a task or generate a response is critical but not necessarily easy to do. Try silently counting to 60 while a child is thinking before intervening or speaking. This gives your child a chance to reflect on their response and perhaps refined rather than respond with their first gut reaction.
- Help Children Develop Hypothesis
Taking a moment to form hypotheses during play is a critical thinking exercise. Try asking your child questions such as “if we do this, what do you think will happen?”. Or “let’s predict what we think will happen next.”
Developing a critical mindset is becoming one of the most essential skills for success in our technology and information-overloaded world. By instilling critical thinking skills early in life, you will be teaching your kids how to analyse the world around them.
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