Cognitive Development Activities for 3 to 5 year olds

Once your child gets past the early preschool activities and you are stumped for what to teach them… i.e. they seem to have picked up “life” things already, try some of these things:

Verbal Games (usually very good for in the car)

• Guess What?: “Guess what has four feet and a long hairy nose?”
• Inventory Questions: “Yesterday, what did you have for breakfast?”
• Yes or No: “The sky is yellow.”
• Which One Doesn’t Belong, and Why? “newspaper, book, computer, or birthday card?”
• Follow My Directions: “Crawl under the table…move two steps to the left…” (Works even better if you hide an M&M at the end.)
• Categories: “sock…shoe…shirt…” (the child says, “Clothes!”). Or you can do the reverse game where you name the category, and the child thinks of as many items that fit. We used to use a sing song or silly pattern to give them time to think, i.e. “Doo Dee Daa Daa… shoe…. Doo Dee Daa Daa… shirt….). You can also play this game on paper while drawing pictures, if your child is visual, and take turns if you have multiple siblings.
• Finish It: “I like to…”
• What Comes Next?: “tree flower flower tree flower flower…” (the child says “tree!”)
• What Did I Repeat?: “pig horse pig chicken” (the child says, “pig!”)
• What Do You Do If…?: “What do you do if you get locked outside?” (kindergarteners)

Activities

• Hide and Seek (and variations: count by twos, fives, tens)
• I Spy (colors, shapes, textures, smells, other adjectives)
• Charades
• Simon Says
• Twenty Questions w. increasingly helpful clues
• “Hotter/Colder” (hide something and guide with clues to proximity)
• “Pictionary” (not the real board game, but just you and your child with a piece of paper)
• shell and pea game
• popsicle stick crafts (birdhouses, bridges, etc)
• “Highlights” or Puzzlemania magazine (some activities are too hard, but others are fine)
• sorting laundry by proper owner
• making a grocery list (based on observation)
• workbook pages with Complete the Pattern exercises

Board Games

• Memory
• Connect Four
• Dominoes
• Dot to Dot game
• Tic Tac Toe
• Battleship
• Old Maid
• Uno
• Candyland (the easiest)
• Chutes and Ladders (slightly harder)
• Guess Who? (harder)

Toys

• Megafort (strategy, imagination)
• Tangrams or mosaic-type games
• harder Lego sets (deduction, directions)
• puzzles (25 pieces for beginners, up to 300 pieces for a 5 yr old)

Sensory/Motor

• Mouse Trap
• Domino Rally
• Elefun
• Marble Run (Quercetti)
• obstacle course
• putting away silverware (no sharp knives obviously)
• matching/folding socks
• filling dishwasher (plastic items)
• “What Do You Feel?”: blindfold and feel/identify objects in sand, rice, beans, or brown bags

Remember that with cognitive development, you are trying to grow and exercise thinking skills… not acquire information! Academic activities like “Brain Quest” help your child get smarter, but they do not necessarily grow their cognitive skills, although some of the spatial games and riddles are an exception. Real cognition is not adding more content, but more structure.  It is not information but the neural infrastructure that makes the content come alive… connections, conclusions, etc. So you want games which encourage comprehension (what and why?), analysis (breaking information down), synthesis (putting information together), and evaluation (So What? or Is it good?).  Don’t confuse making your kid “smarter” with exercising their brain. Of course the two go together, but there are specific ways to get the thinking skills to stretch and grow that strategy games/toys force while academic learning does not. You don’t have to buy stuff if you don’t want to, but if you don’t, you’ll need to make up for it with even more verbal one-on-one time.  Kids this age thrive on skill-building.

Most cognitive development occurs in tandem with language so that your talking to your child with more reasoning-based or refined analysis will teach the child how to reason/analyze. But don’t confuse this with your child’s talking (expressive) ability, which may not match their cognitive ability. Three year old boys are ready to learn this stuff, even if they can’t talk. This is easy to forget. Talk through the Who/What/Where/When/Why/How as if they understood it all. You’ll be amazed how much it will start coming back to you by the time they’re four and five.

Also remember: All Problems are Opportunities. The more problems your child encounters and works out, the smarter she will ultimately be. This is because little children learn a lot by memory and routine. When something is thwarted, however, the routine is interrupted and they are forced to think up new options. They are also forced to consider outside information like house rules or consequences. My husband and I stage “problems” sometimes to make things into learning opportunities. (“Uh-oh. The power went out. Why did it go out? What could we do?”… or “Uh-oh. I can’t reach the game I want. And Daddy’s not here to help me. What do I do?”)

That said, here are some more (free!) ways to encourage problem-solving around the house…

1. Simple chores and house projects are great teachers. Real-life applications with, almost always, problems to work through.
2. Reason through their own situations with them—ask the right questions and wait for them to respond, don’t just fix everything or tell them the right conclusion.
3. Be prepared to “be in the moment.” Learning opportunities come up frequently with preschool children where they’re open to your guidance/moralizing, but you have to be prepared to do it on their timetable… (usually never yours!)
4. Allow your child to make harmless mistakes and learn from them. Preschoolers often want their own way but are capable of realizing that adult advice makes more sense when shown. So work with their initiative. For example, they don’t want to wear a coat so let them outside in the cold and see. They want a certain game that is too hard without supervision and you don’t want to play, so let them see that they can’t do it on their own and change their minds. Don’t be cruel or unsafe. Just let their brains figure it out. Sometimes YOU will be the one who is surprised at their ingenuity!
5. Work on a project from beginning to end. This can teach a child so much. But it can also take a long time. For example, talk about needing enough food, go to the pantry to see, make a list of what you want to serve, what’s in those things, go to the store to get them, take them home and put them away, start cooking the food, then eat it. Whew! (Try this with just one item or one easy meal first, like pizza.)
6. Tell them something isn’t right and let them guess. As in, “We can’t go to bed until we’re all ready. But we’re not ready yet. What do we have to do?”
7. Always, always, always ask questions like, “What do we do next?” “What should you do?” “What do we need?”… This teaches children to think before they act, cry, or seek help. Most three to five year  olds verbalize their thinking aloud rather than silently, so you can figure out what’s making them upset or stuck. Older children may be able to answer Why? or What If? scenarios, which gives you a chance to get inside their thinking process and embellish or refine it as necessary.