Help Your Child Think Big!

Use math to build your childs abstract-thinking skills. More for Ages 3-5
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In order to understand abstract concepts, your child has to abstract the ideas from their physical surroundings and from the objects that are significant to them. After listening to her mom read The Giving Tree, for example, 4-year-old Rose said, "This book is about selfish." She was able to extend the theme from the story to her world. All significant learning involves abstract thinking. Young children can and should abstract concepts from their world. By having meaningful play and learning interactions, finding new ways to represent objects and experiences, and generalizing those experiences, your child learns to think abstractly. This skill allows him to build theories about his world.

Abstract Understanding How

Thinking to Encourage

and Abstract

Numbers Shapes Thinking

Abstract Thinking and Numbers The development of abstract thinking goes hand in hand with your child's developing math skills. Over time, children develop increasingly abstract ideas about numbers and counting. Almost from the day they are born, babies are sensitive to quantities. By 8 to 12 months of age, they can

tell which of two very small collections is greater than the other. They are beginning the long process of learning complex ideas about numbers and counting. A significant development occurs at about age 2, when children can engage in symbolic, or pretend, play: They begin to incorporate ideas and relationships in their play and to mentally represent quantities. For example, Sammy might say, "I'll be the daddy, you be the sister, and this rock will be the dog." While playing this way, he might set out two plates: one for himself (the daddy) and one for his friend (the sister). He might then grab two spoons automatically, without counting and place one on each plate. Sammy is abstracting ideas about numbers by playing with concrete objects. Developing an understanding of number words is important, too. These words help children to be consciously aware of the concept of numbers and to recognize that it is possible to classify collections. For example, 3-year-old Hannah was sitting with her dog when another dog came toward them to visit. She said to her mom, "Two doggy!" and asked her mother to give her two treats. She then gave one treat to each dog. This is an important abstraction, because the very idea of two is an abstract concept. Hannah was able to use the word two to represent the number of dogs she saw. Your child builds on these early math ideas by learning to count. Together, the development of number words and counting skills allow children to build abstract number comparisons, as well. For example, after age 3, most children can accurately compare the amounts in two collections of dissimilar objects, such as a pile of blocks and one of chips. They can also accurately compare collections that they can't see, such as a group of marbles and a sequence of drumbeats. Between 4 and 4 years of age, children can compare collections that are each made up of a mixture of different objects. This shows that they see numeration as an increasingly abstract idea that doesn't depend on the size or nature of the objects counted. Your child develops abstract ideas about counting through writing, too. Preschoolers understand that written marks on paper can convey information about quantity. For example, 3 and 4 year olds can make tally marks on paper to show how many items they count.

Understanding Shapes For children, understanding the concept of "shape" is another way to make sense of the world, and it is another step in gaining abstract-thinking skills. This understanding involves making generalizations about everyday surroundings. Young children can learn about shapes more deeply than we realize. At first, they learn about shapes as "wholes"; for example, recognizing that something is a rectangle because "it looks like a door." When your child can separate the shape from the background, consider it, and distinguish it from other things, she has abstracted that shape. Later, after many experiences with shapes, your child can recognize, say, a triangle, in different sizes and orientations. Indeed, he may find that the particular shape can vary. For example, a shape can be "long and skinny" and still be a triangle. Color, thickness, and other attributes are now seen as irrelevant to the idea. They have abstracted the idea of the shape. Simultaneously,

your child begins another important abstraction: He mentally "pulls out" the individual parts of shapes. For example, he begins to see a triangle not just as a shape that looks a certain way, but as one that has three sides and three corners. In our work with young children, we have found that this ability gives young children a feeling of power. One girl proclaimed, "It's very pointy and very long, but I know it's a triangle. Look: one, two, three straight sides!"

How to Encourage Abstract Thinking You can help your child build abstract thinking skills throughout the day by talking about, and helping her reflect on, her experiences. Try these activities:

Count everything. Count stairs as you go up; count plates for meals; count raisins for snacks, and so on. Help your child learn the counting rules. Using a puppet (Mr. Mixup), count incorrectly and invite your child to correct him. Ask her to describe what Mr. Mixup did wrong. Your child will count more consistently with smaller numbers. Play with routes and maps. With very young children, talk about landmarks you see when you take walks, indoors or out. Your child can begin to create models of these landmarks using toys. An older child can try to build a model of his bedroom, for example, and eventually start to draw simple maps. He can also play games, such as trying to find objects you've hidden using a simple map you've drawn of your home. Emphasize that models and maps are shrunken versions of the original space. Provide lots of opportunities for hands-on experiences. Manipulatives (pattern blocks, shape sets, connecting cubes, and unit blocks) and other objects (buttons, rocks, or beads) help your child build representations of mathematical ideas. Young children often possess knowledge about numbers, but they cannot express that knowledge; manipulatives can help them do that. Build with shapes. Have blocks of different shapes readily available for making designs and building. Point out shapes in everyday objects and try to re-create them with blocks. Encourage problem-solving. Manipulatives, such as blocks, can be used for counting, arithmetic, patterning, and building geometric forms. Encourage children to use these materials to solve a variety of problems and then to reflect on and justify their solutions. This is an essential step in abstracting the ideas that the manipulatives help develop. Classify for a reason. Sort and classify all kinds of items. Emphasize that people create the categories for sorting. When cleaning up, put blocks of the same shape together, or classify blocks that roll and those that do not. Talk to your child. Discussion helps your child turn language and thought on themselves, and helps them learn abstract concepts. Discuss events that happened long ago and far away. This helps your child learn to represent ideas and manipulate symbols abstractly, but meaningfully. Ask her to reflect on her day and plan what she will do tomorrow. If she is trying to solve a problem, ask her to consider other ways of approaching it. Have your child represent her ideas in many different ways, such as by talking, singing, dramatizing, or drawing all the "languages" of children. Ask questions: Why? Why not? What if? These questions prompt your child to think about and describe features of mathematical objects, such as shapes. They also encourage looking at things from another's point of view.

Help your child learn to ask good questions. Young children rarely ask for more information when they do not understand, but given explicit encouragement, they learn to do so. Share math books. Read and discuss books that teach mathematical ideas, such as counting, size relationships, shapes, and so forth.

We can observe our children thinking abstractly every day. They are wonderful thinkers, and they're pondering their world all the time. Victor, for example, loved to point out birds. One day, he spotted a butterfly and excitedly said, "Bird!" Victor had used abstract thinking to develop a theory that things with wings, or maybe things that fly and are bigger than bugs, are birds. Although his abstraction needs some refinement, his ability to think in this way will serve him well in the future. He is working hard to make sense of his world. When we work with our children to talk about, and help them refine, their abstractions, we are helping them learn.
http://www.scholastic.com/resources/article/help-your-child-think-big#Numbers

Improving Your Child's Thinking Skills

http://school.familyeducation.com/gifted-education/cognitive-psychology/38660.html
by the Council for Exceptional Children Six Major Thinking Skills One of the simplest and easiest ways to develop kids' thinking skills is by wording questions in the right way. When teachers and parents learn to ask questions that stimulate kids' thought processes, learning can be fun for children of all ages. Whether we are conscious of it or not, different types of questions require us to use different kinds or levels of thinking. According to Bloom's Taxonomy, a widely recognized classification system, human thinking skills can be broken down into six categories. Click below to find out more about each category and what you can do to help your child improve her thinking skills. Knowledge, comprehension, and application are moreconcrete thinking skills. Analysis, synthesis, andevaluation require more abstraction and are known as critical thinking skills. Knowledge Knowledge involves remembering or recalling appropriate, previously learned information to draw out factual (usually right or wrong) answers. Asking the Right Questions: Use words and phrases such as: how many, when, where, list, define, tell, describe, identify, etc., to draw out factual answers and test your child's recall and recognition skills. Sample questions: How many eggs in a dozen? When was Abraham Lincoln president? Comprehension Comprehension involves grasping or understanding the meaning of informational materials. Asking the Right Questions: Use words such as: describe, explain, estimate, predict, identify, differentiate, etc., to encourage your child to translate, interpret, and extrapolate. Sample questions: Explain how an egg becomes a chicken. What important events occurred during the years Lincoln was president? Application Application involves applying previously learned information (or knowledge) to new and unfamiliar situations. Asking the Right Questions: Use words such as: demonstrate, apply, illustrate, show, solve, examine, classify, experiment, etc., to encourage your child to apply knowledge to situations that are new and unfamiliar.

Sample questions: What do an egg and the shape of the globe have in common? Can an egg grow into a cow? How did Abe Lincoln's personal views on slavery fit with the events of the time? Analysis Analysis involves breaking down information into parts, or examining (and trying to understand the organizational structure of) information. Asking the Right Questions: Use words and phrases such as: what are the differences, analyze, explain, compare, separate, classify, arrange, etc., to encourage your child to break information down into parts. Sample questions: What is one difference between eggs laid by a frog and a chicken? Compare and contrast some significant contributions made by presidents during the 1800s. Synthesis Synthesis involves applying prior knowledge and skills to combine elements into a pattern not clearly there before. Asking the Right Questions: Use words and phrases such as: combine, rearrange, substitute, create, design, invent, what if?, etc., to encourage your child to combine elements into a pattern that's new. Sample questions: What might happen if a cow laid eggs? Knowing what you know about egg-laying animals, what could you say about animals that don't lay eggs? What if Abe Lincoln lived today? What problem might he solve? Evaluation Evaluation involves judging or deciding according to some set of criteria, without real right or wrong answers. Asking the Right Questions: Use words such as: assess, decide, measure, select, explain, conclude, compare, summarize, etc., to encourage your child to make judgements according to a set of criteria. Sample questions: What do egg-laying animals have in common? What might have happened if Abe Lincoln never lived? What are some ways that history might be different? The use of critical thinking is one of the most valuable skills we can pass on to our children. Gifted children, especially, tend to take mental leaps and you might notice that they use synthesis and evaluation without teaching or prompting. Supporting and nurturing these skills is crucial to the development of strong academic and lifelong problem-solving skills. Remember, the most important thing is to have fun with these skills. When kids enjoy discussions with their parents and teachers, they'll love to learn.

Raising a Thinking Child

Help Your Young Child to Resolve Everyday Conflicts and Get Along with Others The "I Can Problem Solve" Program

by Myrna B. Shure, Ph.D. with Theresa Foy

Digeronimo, M.ED

Excerpt
Back to main Raising a Thinking Childpage

Sample ICPS Dialogues

This chapter is not a cookbook of precisely measured recipes for raising thinking children. I don't expect that you'll read and memorize every dialogue and I certainly don't want you to think that they represent the only way to use ICPS with your children in the given situations. ICPS dialoguing is a style of talk with children but it is not based on a memorized script. The dialogues will be most useful to you if you use them as a handy reference guide. Let's say, for example, that you find yourself slipping back into old habits -- you find that you can't stand the bickering and arguing that goes on among your children, and you revert to yelling. Rather than read through the whole book to get back on the ICPS track, a quick look through this chapter will remind you how you can talk about the problem the ICPS way. To make it even easier for you, if your child has a persistent problem that you seem to be losing ground on -- let's say grabbing toys away from other children -- you can look up Grabbing in this chapter (by checking the list on page 191) and refresh your memory about the questions you want to ask your child in this circumstance. The next time he grabs a toy, you'll be ready to ICPS immediately. So this chapter can be used with a bookmark. If you need a quick refresher or have a specific problem you want to ICPS, here's where you can quickly brush up on the skill of raising an ICPS thinker.

Child-Child Problems
Child-child problems are ones that occur between children and their friends. As your children are

learning and practicing ICPS, your role is to listen for when these kinds of problems occur and then to ask questions that prompt ICPS thinking. Before we ICPS a typical problem among young children -- hitting -- let's take a look at some of the many responses I've heard parents use over the years. As you read through these non-ICPS conversations, see if any sound familiar to you. They point out several ways parents often deal with this problem.

Non-ICPS Conversations About Hitting

CHILD: Bobby hit me. PARENT: When did he hit you? CHILD: In school. PARENT: I'll talk to the teacher about it tomorrow. (In this conversation, the parent solves the problem. The child is not engaged in thinking about the problem at all.) In the two conversations below, two mothers give their children different advice about the hitting problem, but they both use the same approach. CHILD: Amy hit me today. PARENT: Hit her back. CHILD: She'd punch me in the nose. PARENT: Every time she hits you, hit her back. I don't want you to be so timid. CHILD: But I'm afraid. PARENT: If you don't learn to defend yourself, kids will keep on hitting you. CHILD: Okay. CHILD: Danny knocked me down. PARENT: What did you do then? CHILD: I hit him back. PARENT: You shouldn't hit back. Hitting is not nice. You might hurt someone. It's better to tell the teacher. CHILD: Then he'll call me a tattletale. PARENT: If you don't tell the teacher, he'll keep on hitting you. CHILD: Okay. (These parents ignored their children's view's and suggested consequences of their own. One parent told her child what to do; the other, what not to do. But neither child was encouraged to think and decide for him- or herself) When you tell your children how to solve the problem, whether or not your advice is accompanied by explanations, you miss the opportunity to encourage them to offer options of their own. If you insist that one solution is best, as in the above examples, the children are actively discouraged from thinking further about what to do and are left only with worry about how to do what you suggest. With the best of intentions, these parents ignored their children's perception of the problem and never found out why they were hit in the first place.

Sometimes parents do find out why a child was hit, but still are only concerned with what they think the child ought to do. For example: PARENT: Why did he hit you? CHILD: I don't know. PARENT: Did you hit him first, take his toys, or what? CHILD: I took his book. PARENT: Are you supposed to take someone else's things? CHILD: No. PARENT: What are you supposed to do when you want something? CHILD: Ask for it. PARENT: Yes, you should ask. Taking his book is the wrong thing to do. That's why he hit you. (Still this parent continues to impose her own solution rather than extract one from the child's view.) Some parents include in their conversation thoughts about other people's feelings. But merely telling children how people feel does not stimulate them to think further about it: PARENT: Why did Trisha hit you? CHILD: Her friend told her to. PARENT: That must have made you angry. CHILD: Yeah. I'm gonna throw sand in her face. PARENT: If you do that, she'll get angry, and then you'll have a real fight on your hands. Show her you're a big girl and pay her no mind. (This parent talks about feelings but is most intent on teaching her child not to hit.) In all these instances, the advice may differ but the approach is the same: The parent does the thinking for the child. ICPS is different; the ICPS parent guides the child to think about the problem.

An ICPS Dialogue About Hitting

Take a look at this full ICPS dialogue about hitting. To remind you of the purpose of some of the questions, I've pointed out the ICPS process as it appears. PARENT: Terry, who hit you? CHILD: Natalie. PARENT: What happened? Why did she hit you? (Parent looks for child's view of the problem.) CHILD: She just hit me. PARENT: You mean she just hit you for no reason? (Parent encourages child to think of causes.) CHILD:Well, I hit her first. PARENT: What for?

CHILD: She won't let me look at her book. PARENT: How did Natalie feel when you hit her? (Parent guides child to think of feelings of others.) CHILD: Mad. PARENT: Do you know WHY she doesn't want you to look at her book? (Parent guides child to appreciate point of view of others.) CHILD: No. PARENT: How can you find out? CHILD: I could ask her. PARENT: See if you can find out. (Parent encourages child to seek facts and discover the problem.) (later) CHILD: She said I never let her see my books. PARENT: Now that you know why she said no, can you think of something you could do or say so she'll let you look at her book? (Parent encourages child to think of solution.) CHILD: I could stop playing with her. PARENT: What MIGHT happen if you do that? (Child is guided to think of consequences of her solution.) CHILD: She might not be my friend. PARENT: Do you want her to be your friend? CHILD: Yes. PARENT: Can you think of something DIFFERENT to do so she'll still be your friend? (Parent encourages further solution thinking.) CHILD: I could let her have one of my books. PARENT: That's a DIFFERENT idea. Why don't you try that? When this mother discovered that her child hit first, she didn't offer advice or lecture on the pros and cons of hitting. Instead she continued the ICPS dialogue by encouraging her child to think about Natalie's feelings and the original problem (wanting the book). Then she helped her child look for alternative ways to solve the problem and consider what might happen as a result of those solutions. In the end, it's the child who will solve this problem, not the parent -- that's ICPS. In the ICPS child-child and parent-child dialogues throughout this chapter, you'll find one way in which parents have used the problem-solving approach when a particular problem came up. Once you have a feel for this approach, you will find the process easy to adapt to whichever problem or conflict arises.