You play a huge role in building your child’s thinking skills. The good news is that building thinking skills doesn’t have to look like “education.” Mostly, it looks like playing. And it’s easy to play fun and targeted games that will help your child’s brain grow by leaps and bounds.

The most important goal of cognitive development is to instill an attitude that learning is fun. That means that we keep our demeanor positive, don’t push when a child’s not interested, encourage a lot, and play, play, play!

Secondly, you want to work with the development that is already happening in your child’s brain. The best activities will be slightly above your child’s current skill level. Too much challenge will discourage her. Too little challenge, and she’ll be bored. Follow our blog for ways to target your learning games to where your child is.

The idea of thinking skills may bring up thoughts of alphabet, numbers, and colors. These are all part of growing brains. But cognitive development also involves increasing attention span and concentration, engaging the imagination, practicing memory, connecting physical activity with abstract concepts, and connecting thoughts with words.

You can help your child grow in all of these areas using the simple games and activities in this section. For ideas on how to do this, use the drop down menu under Cognitive Development at the top of this page.