Kid Fitness: Flexing The Mind

by Heather Long | More from this Blogger

17 Oct 2006 02:30 PM

We talked about stimulating your child's mind earlier and why this is good for them. Here are a few more exercises designed to help stimulate the minds of older and younger children alike. You might try a few out for yourself as well.

• Observation Challenge - You perform this exercise by putting a few objects on a tray and giving the child about 10 to 20 seconds to look at it, then cover it up - ask them to name all the objects that are on the tray. You can add the number of items or reduce the observation window as you keep practicing
• One Minute Mysteries - There is a series of books called one minute mysteries and there are books called Encyclopedia Brown - while these are geared for children ages 8 and older, they are a great challenge for the logical mind and they make you think about the clues that have been revealed and try to solve the mystery
• Mnemonics - Mnemonics are memory tools that help you identify information based on some kind of acronym - for colors it used to be Roy G Biv - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. You can create mnemonics for just about everything - kids do this on their own sometimes, but you can help them come up with their own mnemonic keys - we did this when my daughter was learning her phone number -it worked faster than anything else we tried
• Store Games - When you're out shopping, you can put your child in charge of the cart and have them organize it by letter, by like objects or even by aisles - when we're making a shopping list, we think of the layout of the store and we mentally shop the aisles - making the list so that we can move from top to bottom and not bob up and down - challenge your child to join you in this exercise

What are some other mental exercises you can think of for your child to perform?

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Learn more about Heather Long

Heather Long is 35 years old and currently lives in Wylie, Texas. She has been a freelance writer for six years. Her husband and she met while working together at America Online over ten years ago.

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