6 Activities to Nurture Logical Reasoning Skills in Children

At the time of educating the children, educators often take help of story elements. These story elements are necessary as children cannot understand the complex processes and theorems. But that does not mean that children will be educated without any logical reasoning. Once a child starts going to school, parents have to understand that their children are at their growth ages. They have to nurture the logical reasoning and critical thinking skills of their children at this time. 

Apart from school education, parents need to engage their children in activities that improve their reasoning skills. Get the idea of a few activities to try for this purpose. 

Answer Their Questions

Children are curious about anything and everything. They keep asking questions about every single thing. Parents often don’t have enough time to answer these questions. Plus, sometimes, parents don’t have a fitting answer for their children. As a result, a number of questions remain unanswered. 

This is the study of almost all families, but this common story may kill the curiosity of the children to a great extent. As a result of this, children will feel that the questions they are making do not make any sense.  Gradually, they will stop making questions to their parents. They will stop asking questions to teachers about the lessons even though some points are unclear to them. 

This is not at all expected and to avoid the possibility of killing their curiosity, parents, and teachers have to give a logical answer to their queries. No matter how trivial and silly the question is, answer them. It is possible that you don’t have the answer to the question - in that case, ask for some time from them and answer them later. Just do not overlook their questions and do not give them any illogical answers. A story element in the answer is alright, but only story, with no logic, is wrong. 

Ask Them Open-ended Questions 

Playing question-answer games with children is another way to develop their logical reasoning skills. During this game, ask them WH questions or to be more specific, ask them open-ended questions. It will help the parents to see how their children are forming the answers. 

Yes-no questions need to be skipped for this game if the focus is developing critical thinking skills. WH questions will force them to structure the answer and express that in one or more full sentences. Also, these types of questions often come with an assembling or organizing task. It will improve the logical sense as well. 

Put Them In Complex Situation

Parents often believe that their children only need to focus on their studies and for the rest of the daily activities, parents are there. This is an incorrect attitude of parents. Children have to take part in all the light daily activities (household and outdoor activities). It will help them in their overall development and grow their logical reasoning skills. 

For example, parents can bring their children to the kitchen and while making a juice, parents have to skip an element intentionally. Once the child will taste the juice, he/she will figure out that it does not taste as it should taste. They will start thinking about what is missing in it and with parental assistance, they will figure this out and add that in the juice and drink that. These types of activities are essential every single day so that children get the chance to think. 

Engage Them In Games

When it comes to help children in critical thinking, games are undoubtedly one of the best activities. Games bring a number of situations where the players have to think critically and come up with a better game plan. Be it indoor games like Chess or Ludo or outdoor games like soccer or baseball or anything - each one will give plenty of chances to develop logical thinking skills. 

Encourage Them to Think Differently

In studies as well as in daily activities, everything can be done in multiple ways. Sometimes these different ways make the task easy and sometimes these complicate the task. While teaching a subject or a household work, always ask them if they have any opinion of doing the same task in any other ways. Encourage them to do that practically and figure out whether that is actually a smarter technique or not. 

Assist, But Don't Work On Their Behalf

Children commonly need parental help - it cannot be denied that they cannot do everything solely by themselves. Parents or teachers or tutors have to assist them. But they need to remember that their task is to help and guide the child. Whether it is doing the assignment or household work or a game stroke, the child has to do it by him/herself. No one will do this on their behalf. 

So, fostering logical reasoning skills needs some healthy practice. Parents simply need to stop doing everything for their child - rather they need to encourage and help their child to do that on their own. These activities, along with answering their queries will make a child more logical.