Story Time: How To Develop Critical Thinking In Children
Reading to your child every day is a wonderful way to bond, not to mention an incredibly valuable and beneficial learning experience. It is also a great way to develop critical thinking skills. But how can you develop critical thinking in children?
We are going to make you discover how you can develop these thinking skills during story time. It is easier than you might think, but the most important thing is that it is learning a very important skill for life.
The importance of reading in critical thinking
It takes being a dedicated parent to your children, especially in today’s busy lifestyle, to have time to read every day. To do this, you must understand the benefits of reading and prioritize it above all else.
The value you place on your children when you read to them goes far beyond what you can imagine. As for how old your children should be when you stop reading stories to them, it depends on the little ones and if they are still enjoying the activity. Even if your child learns to read, it is good to continue reading to him in the same way.
Take the opportunity to do some reading with your child or take turns reading. One of the most useful activities you can do every day while reading, from the moment your child can understand the words, is to question them meaningfully to develop thinking skills.
Higher order thinking skills
Learning to think is a vital skill that must be practiced. The human brain must be exercised like any muscle to continue growing. Reading is the perfect opportunity to develop higher order thinking skills in your children.
By using some very basic question types, you will have your child think, analyze, predict, compare, decide, give opinions and deduce, among other skills.
There are many benefits to be gained from the simple act of reading and listening alone, but by taking the opportunity to add some questioning techniques, little ones will develop important cognitive skills that will enable them to think ahead.
Critical thinking questions
There are many different types and styles of questions that can be asked, each with a different purpose and to stimulate a different thinking skill. Is not difficult. Here we talk about 3 examples of the types of questions you could use while reading to your children:
Questions that make predictions in critical thinking
This type of question asks children to make predictions in a story. They could predict, for example:
- The story from the clues that can be found on the cover of the book.
- What happens at the end of a story.
- What happens at the beginning (if you read the end of a story first).
- What could happen if a character makes a certain decision (and other scenarios to make different decisions).
Questions that require inference
Inference means that details are not explicitly mentioned in a text, but there are clues that lead the reader to deduce the answer to the question. Children learn to read between the lines.
Take, for example, an illustration in a story of an outdoor scene where the sun is shining. If you ask your child if it is day or night, he may not find the answer in the text, however, he can find evidence in the illustration to show that it is day. This is called inference, and it is a great skill for developing critical thinking.
Questions about the main idea to improve critical thinking
Children find it difficult to summarize the main idea of a story or passage in one sentence. If the full text deals with the migration habits of birds, for example, many little ones will identify a main idea that is too broad like, it is about birds, or too narrow, for example, it says that it is one of the many species mentioned in the text, or simply refers to something that was said in the first sentence.
Asking questions about the main idea will teach youngsters to think clearly and formulate concise and logical ideas. Most children struggle a lot with comprehension questions and do not seem to improve upon entering high school. They struggle to express themselves in clear sentences and often provide answers that don’t really answer the question directly.
For this very reason, the best thing you can do for your child is to familiarize him with answering logical questions at an early age. The time invested from a very young age will pay off much later.
It may be as little as 5 minutes a day, but it will have a huge impact on your little one’s ability to think logically and solve problems. So, think no more and find a time during the day to invest in reading with your children to develop their critical thinking. They will be grateful to you!
