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Brain Gym Exercises for Smarter Kids?

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Brain development early childhood continues to grow rapidly during this phase of her life.

Raise-Smart-Kid is here to help you through this brain development early childhood phase.

Brain Gym Exercises

What is Cognition in Children?

A good way to define cognition in children (also called brain development early childhood, child cognitive development) is your child's ability to learn new skills and concepts.

Child cognitive development is her ability to make sense of events that happen around her, her ability to use her long term memory accurately and her ability to solve small problems.

Brain gym exercises done with young children will help your child ease through the different stages of brain development.

Brain Development Early Childhood

Every day you will notice examples of how your child cognitive development - her understanding of new concepts and her problem-solving skills are developing throughout her second and third years.

At this age children are in the imagination stage. They become altogether better at both thinking and learning by exercising preschool learning games and preschool learning activities. Brain gym exercises will also help improve imagination.

Brain Gym Exercises and Early Childhood Cognitive Development:

Symbolism

Until she reached 18 months or so, your growing child was unable to use symbols - in other words, she could only think in terms of here-and-now.

If an object was not physically in front of her, she had difficulty thinking about it.

But this changes mid-way through the second year, when she starts to think in images.

The emergence of symbolism vastly increases the possibilities for cognitive development in young children.

Child Development Attention Span

Part of learning and cognition involves focusing on a piece of information long enough to extract meaning from it.
Babies have a random attention span, but as your child nears the end of her second year she begins to exercise control over the attention she gives to an object or activity.
When something grabs her interest, she focuses on it until she has satisfied her curiosity.

Long Term Memory

The ability to recall previously learned information is an essential part of learning and cognition in young children.
This capacity increases in the second and third years.
Both her short- and long term memory become more effective.
This allows her to remember recent experiences (something that happened perhaps a minutes ago) and distant experiences (something that happened several months ago).

Language and Cognition

Learning and baby language development are closely connected.

Your toddler's language explosion improves not only her communication skills but also her ability to learn.

She uses language to ask questions, to test out her ideas, to reason, and to improve her understanding of the world.

Continuous Learning

Remember, however, that she continues to learn principally through explorative and imaginative play toys and through listening, talking and discussing.

It doesn't matter whether she play with an empty box, with a bath toy, with her cutlery during meals, with a jigsaw, or in fact with anything at all.

When she interacts playfully with anything in her environment she learns new things and brain development early childhood takes place.

The same applies to cognition and language - she learns something new in every conversation she has.

Look on her as a dynamic scientist, who soaks up information like a sponge and is then eager to put this new knowledge into practice.

Normal Routine

Of course, there are specific things you can do to stimulate and promote brain development early childhood, but do keep in mind that a substantial amount of learning takes place every day just through you child following her normal routine.

For example, getting dressed in the morning is a complex task involving sorting, matching, hand eye coordination, memory and concentration.

Bit-by-bit, each day she learns more about dressing until she achieves a level of mastery at the age of 3 that seems light years ahead of her competence at the same task when she was only 15 months old.

Her View of the World

It's important not to make assumptions about your child's thought processes.

Despite her remarkable progress in early child development, there are still two distinctive characteristics of her learning and cognition skills that are different from yours.

Firstly, she doesn't fully understand cause and effect, and may identify a connection between two events where no such connection exists.

This is partly due to her immature reasoning and partly due to her lack of experience.
For instance, if a light goes out - perhaps because the bulb has broken - at the exact moment that she sneezes, your child may think that her sneeze has caused the lights to go off.
Then in future you could find that every time she sneezes, she looks around anxiously waiting for something to happen to the lights!
When your child makes a comment about a cause-and-effect connection (for instance, when she tells you that she make the rain appear because it started when she put her coat on), you should explain clearly why the connection doesn't really exist.
She might not believe you at first, so you will probably need to repeat your explanation later.

A second major difference in her thinking is that she still tends to see things only from her own point of view.

That's why your 2 year old looks blankly at you when you reprimand her, for example, for playing with her older brother's toys when she was previously warned off.
The rebuke "How do you think your brother feels when you mess up his toys?" goes right over her head, because she isn't yet at the stage when she can easily see things from another person's perspective.

She begins to be able to appreciate other points of view by the end of her third year.