Children's Cognitive Games

Cognitive development occurs rapidly in children. Cognitive abilities include motor skills, speaking, reasoning and socializing. Stages of Cognitive development change every two to four months when children are younger, and then slow down as they get older. The cognitive development of children can be tested in many ways, including IQ tests like the Stanford Binet, which scores children on the concept of their mental age. Providing games to increase cognitive ability is one way to combine having fun with your child while still enriching their cognition.

  1. Motor Skills

    • Games to promote motor skills are important when increasing cognitive ability. Motor skills help human beings use controlled movements to perform a task. Gross motor skills help a child to jump, walk, skip and throw. Games to encourage gross motor skills include basketball, baseball and other organized sports.

      Fine motor skills are the skills that help you learn to do tasks with the small muscles of your hands. Try games that require children to use clothespins or tweezers to grab small items like pieces of fabric or paper. Other games to encourage include marbles or jacks, which allow children to manipulate small objects.

    Language Development

    • Another important aspect of cognitive development is language development. Games that match pictures with words are a good choice for younger children. Hold up a shape and make a game of naming it. You can also play games with rhyming words, such as telling your child a word and then allowing him to supply another that rhymes, even it is nonsensical. Any game that increases a child's vocabulary is a great way to promote her language development. Games to promote language skills include flash cards with pictures and names so kids can learn to identify common objects.

      Gather some older children and draw pictures that reference a few nouns and verbs. Ask one child to choose a noun and a verb and use them in a complete sentence. Ask the next child recite the original sentence and add information to it, such as an adjective or adverb. You can choose to try and create a story as each new sentence is built. There are also fun language skill games that allow kids to fill in the blanks in a story with random nouns, verbs and other parts of speech.

    Recognizing and Reasoning

    • Games that require a child to sort items into different categories help him learn to recognize groups. Such games also assist him with figuring out what makes the objects that fit into each group similar to each other. Sorting games can also help develop math skills, since recognizing patterns can be an important ability in math. Games that require sorting and counting feathers, blocks or other items are fun ways to help build reasoning ability. Have a few items available for older children to examine and try to classify into groups.

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