Mental growth of kids involves dealing with emotional and social aspects of their personalities. To facilitate mental growth, it may be helpful to engage kids in activities aimed at the same. Such activities help kids regulate their emotions and improve social skills while having fun at the same time.
Here are some things to keep in mind when choosing activities for mental growth of kids:
- Fun: The activity should be one that is full of fun in order to keep a child interested and engaged. For example, guessing games, fun rhymes, water activities, reading themed books, drawing, painting and more.
- Realistic: When making a choice of mental activities for your child, keep your goals realistic. The activity chosen should be in tandem with your child’s abilities in order to get best results. The best way to gauge whether an activity is realistic for your child is to pick one that is age appropriate.
- Instructive: Even though the aim of these activities is to encourage children to be independent, an activity should send a clear message of not crossing certain boundaries of behavior. A child should be able to understand that every action will have a consequence.
- Effective Praise: To get the most out of an activity aimed at mental growth, it is important to praise every little progress a child makes. This encourages the child to expand his horizons even if it calls for taking some risks.
- Safety: Even though it is completely okay and normal for your child to feel scared of engaging in some activities, it is important to ensure that the activities chosen are safe and undertaken in a secure environment. Look out for signs of fear like nervous mannerisms, change in sleeping and eating patterns, etc., as these may be indicative of a need to change the activity.
- Memory And Concentration: For a mental health activity to be effective, choose one that aims at improving your child’s memory and concentration levels. Examples of such activities are games like picture bingo, brain boxes, number string, etc. Such games help a child strengthen his retrievable memory and enhance auditory memory.
- Active learning: Look for activities that promote active learning as opposed to passive learning activities. Active leaning activities engage and challenge a child’s capacity to think and learn with the help of both imaginary and real life scenarios. Such activities should consist of investigative, purposeful, pre-planned and some spontaneous activities. The key is to choose an activity that engages both mind and body.
Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Texas offer a variety of after-school activities to improve the mental growth of kids in Killeen, TX. To know more about how to choose right activities for mental growth of kids, visit 703 N. 8th Street, Killeen, TX - 76541. You can also call at (254) 699 – 5808.