We talked about stimulating your child’s mind earlier and why this is good for them. Here are a few more exercises designed to help stimulate the minds of older and younger children alike. You might try a few out for yourself as well.
- Observation Challenge – You perform this exercise by putting a few objects on a tray and giving the child about 10 to 20 seconds to look at it, then cover it up – ask them to name all the objects that are on the tray. You can add the number of items or reduce the observation window as you keep practicing
- One Minute Mysteries – There is a series of books called one minute mysteries and there are books called Encyclopedia Brown – while these are geared for children ages 8 and older, they are a great challenge for the logical mind and they make you think about the clues that have been revealed and try to solve the mystery
- Mnemonics – Mnemonics are memory tools that help you identify information based on some kind of acronym – for colors it used to be Roy G Biv – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. You can create mnemonics for just about everything – kids do this on their own sometimes, but you can help them come up with their own mnemonic keys – we did this when my daughter was learning her phone number –it worked faster than anything else we tried
- Store Games – When you’re out shopping, you can put your child in charge of the cart and have them organize it by letter, by like objects or even by aisles – when we’re making a shopping list, we think of the layout of the store and we mentally shop the aisles – making the list so that we can move from top to bottom and not bob up and down – challenge your child to join you in this exercise
What are some other mental exercises you can think of for your child to perform?
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