Cognitive development is a major part of childhood development, and watching your child begin to understand core concepts about navigating the world are truly remarkable moments for all parents. Looking for ideas on activities to challenge your toddler’s mind and guide them along the path of understanding? This article will list the top cognitive activities for toddlers that parents should be trying.
Encouraging Your Child’s Growth: The Importance of Cognitive Development
Young children might experience developmental delays or challenges which can be identified and addressed if caught early. For this reason, parents, teachers, and caretakers should carefully observe each child’s development to detect any issues as early as possible. Early identification can help you keep your child on track with adequate support tailored to their needs.
Cognitive skill development from an early age is crucial for children in a highly competitive world. Not only do children grow physically, but they also grow a lot mentally as they observe and interact with the world around them. Parents must foster cognitive development in their child, even as early as the child is born since this will build the foundation for their child’s success in life.
What Are Cognitive Skills?
The core skills the human brain uses to remember, reason, hold attention, solve problems, read, and learn are cognitive skills. These cognitive abilities are what allow you to process new information and distribute it to the areas of the brain it needs to get to. When you try to recall that information later, your brain uses cognitive skills to retrieve it and use that information. Developing cognitive skills helps your brain with these processes more quickly and efficiently, and you ensure that you can effectively understand and process new information.
At school and later on at their job, your child will use their cognitive skills to interpret data, remember goals and pay attention during classes. Cognitive development can start earlier than preschool for children.
Best Brain-Boosting Cognitive Activities for Toddlers
Promoting your child’s cognitive ability is an important part of being a parent, starting in early childhood. This can be anything from talking and singing to your baby, to helping them learn and identify the names of objects. As your child develops cognitively, their play and communication will become more complex. Here are some other ideas for brain-boosting cognitive activities to help their development along:
Encourage creative play. Creative play expands and enhances the cognitive skills of children. Encouraging children to use their imaginations is helpful, and there are many benefits associated with pretend play in child development. “Playing Pretend” is a popular game with small children where they imagine themselves in different roles where they can learn a lot using their imagination and props.
Encourage interest in children’s books and puzzles. Children increase their concentration, patience, and sense of achievement by reading and solving puzzles. Books also serve the purpose of kindling the imagination. Reading aloud from books can also help children build their vocabulary and language skills.
Provide games and toys that are educational. Games can provide both entertainment and education simultaneously. Word, number, and memory games can help kids deepen their cognitive skills while they are playing and having fun.
Play outdoors. Playing fills an important role in cognitive development as a mode of learning and research has shown that stimulating environments such as the outdoors can spur even greater development in the part of the brain which is responsible for thinking, perceiving, and understanding languages.
Vivvi Encourages Cognitive Development
Cognitive development is an important aspect of your child’s early childhood education. Vivvi’s teachers help children reach their developmental milestones so that they are ready for kindergarten, and beyond. We use carefully crafted activities, toys, and books to facilitate early learning. Our teachers are always on-hand to gently encourage your child and expose them to new and familiar activities.
For more information about the Vivvi Learning Model or to learn more about our New York City campuses, contact our team today. We’re hosting virtual tours and open houses every week.