The recent educational focus has been placed on logical thinking skills. Logical thinking skills are based on reasoning and memory.
In the past couple of articles, I have offered some tips and ideas for parents on how to enhance their child’s logical thinking. Many activities can be done in the form of a game. Children think that they are fun and also benefit from them.
Another way to strengthen the logical thinking skills is through analogies. This activity is probably best to begin when your child is about five years old. An analogy is a relationship between a pair of words. They can be very fun and can require your child to use thinking skills. Begin simple with concepts that your child can understand. For example show your child a picture of a dog and a doghouse.
Explain to your child that a doghouse is a home for a dog. Then show your child a picture of a bird and ask what home a bird would have. The analogy would be spoken as follows: Dog is to doghouse as bird is to (nest). Once your child gets the hang of it you can try harder relations between words.
Another fun game for children this age is Twenty Questions. You can play with two people or with a group of people divided into two teams. One person or team will think of a word. He or she will give one phrase to describe it. For example if the word is apple the person could say I am thinking of a fruit.
The other person or team tries to guess what the word is. They can ask twenty yes or no questions to guess. They use the answers to the questions to help formulate other questions and hints and clues about the word.
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