Cognitive Stimulating Exercises For Children
Cognitive stimulating exercises for children include activities and techniques designed to train and improve their intellectual abilities.
Practicing such exercises helps the academic development of both children and adolescents. It also helps them to have a more mobile mind, a better memory and a more effective learning.
For children to do well in school, they must be able to stay focused, have a good memory and learn to reason.
You can get all these things from cognitively stimulating exercises. Best of all, they will have fun while doing so.
What is cognitive stimulation?
Cognition refers to everything that is involved in learning and knowledge. It is the ability to process information. This knowledge can be a learning process, a perception or an experience.
At the same time, cognition means memory, problem solving, decision making, emotions and focus. All of these allow us to recognize loved ones, to imagine future events, and to remember the past.
Cognitive stimulation is a neuropsychological technique that aims to increase children’s mental capacity. With the right cognitive learning methods, it can significantly improve their quality of life.
Of course, such stimuli are useful for all ages. But for infants and children, it can promote their memory, attention and ability to reason.
The importance of cognitively stimulating exercises
That these exercises are so important is largely due to the fantastic plasticity of children’s brains. This plasticity makes it easy for children to adapt to the demands placed on them. At the same time, it facilitates learning and makes them more receptive to cognitive stimulation.
A program with good cognitive stimulating exercises, such as in a workshop, should include mental exercises that stimulate different activation patterns in the nerve pathways.
Activating these patterns repeatedly strengthens existing connections between nerve cells and generates new synapses.
Exercises for cognitive stimulation
Of course, these depend entirely on the space and equipment available, as well as the abilities and maturity of the children involved. In many cases, these activities can be done at home.
Some of the most common exercises are:
- Orienteering exercises. Ask the children to draw a picture of a certain place or the people around them.
- Language exercises. Name, repeat and create lists of objects and words.
- Reading exercises. Work with short texts or conversations where one of the words does not fit. Another option is to list a few words and have the children write down related sentences.
- Descriptive exercises. An example is asking the children to describe an object.
- See differences, or find five wrong exercises. These are about showing the children two very similar pictures and asking them to find the differences.
At what age can you start with cognitively stimulating exercises?
People are social by nature, and that means we develop through social relationships and communication with others.
It is good to start cognitive stimulation with children from the very beginning. Up to the age of six, children are much more susceptible to cognitive stimulation.
6 benefits of cognitively stimulating exercises
- Encourages independence.
- Improves the quality of children’s relationships with others.
- Inspires, provides motivation and prevents children from getting bored.
- They learn to reason and logically work their way through sequences.
- They learn to control and focus their attention, which also results in a better memory.
- By improving their memory, they can more easily absorb and acquire new knowledge.
Advice for parents
Parents should try to ensure that each area of their child’s development is strengthened as much as possible. But do not use coercion and demands to do so. It is also important to try to keep negative influences to a minimum as these can affect the children’s cognitive development in a negative way.
During the first years of life, cognitive stimulation is a slow, laborious and virtually invisible process.
Unlike the ability to talk or walk, it can be difficult to observe from the outside. But as a parent, it is important to ensure that there is a lot of cognitive stimulation in the children’s lives.
Your children need a lot of attention and this must come from the family. This is especially true during the first years of life when children have not yet started school.
Therefore, the family plays the biggest role when it comes to early cognitive stimulation for their children. Parents are their children’s first educators and teachers, as well as their first source of love and affection.
