11 Ways to Improve Cognitive Skills in Young Children

Building cognitive skills is a crucial part of early childhood development.

Here’s a brief overview of how children learn and think, some examples of cognitive skills, and the typical stages of cognitive development in early childhood.

There are also 11 simple, actionable tips for parents and teachers of young children.

What is Cognitive Development in Early Childhood?

It includes how children process information, understand concepts, learn expressive and receptive language, and develop perceptual skills.

Cognitive development is one of the four major areas of a child’s holistic development, along with:

• Physical development
• Social development
• Emotional development

At what Age Does Cognitive Development Begin?

Babies start to develop their cognitive skills from birth. In the past, this wasn’t always known. It was presumed that babies were not yet able to process on a cognitive level until they were able to use language.

Now we know that you can improve and stimulate your baby’s intellectual skills right from birth.

Examples of Cognitive Skills

There are many types of cognitive skills and complex thinking processes that children develop at different ages. Here are some examples of cognitive skills in early childhood:

• Responding to their name
• Recognizing and naming objects in a book
• Verbalizing needs
• Following instructions
• Counting to 10
• Knowing their gender
• Understanding the difference between the present and the past
• Engaging in symbolic play
• Listening to short stories
• Telling stories
• Asking questions
• Reading

This is not a full list of cognitive skills – just a few examples. There are many milestones to be reached during the first few years.

How to Improve Cognitive Skills In Children

During the preschool years, parents can help build their children‘s cognitive development through play and simple activities.

Here are 11 easy cognitive development activities for preschoolers:

1. Reading

There are few activities that will build cognitive skills in preschoolers at the rate that reading to them will.

Reading to your children daily is crucial and will be the difference between a child with a highly developed vocabulary and a child with a basic vocabulary.

While reading to your children, you will be developing:

• Vocabulary
• Language patterns
• Thinking skills
• Writing skills
• Problem-solving abilities
• Attention span
• Memory
• Listening skills

…and much more. 

2. Talking

Language is one of the most important aspects of early childhood cognitive development. The best way to build it is to expose your children not only to hearing language but also to using it.

You are the primary source of your children’s language in the early years and so it is important that you use it in a grammatically correct and stimulating way. Your children will learn to speak by imitating you.

Talk to your children as often as possible, seizing every opportunity. Talk to them in the car, in the bath, while preparing dinner, and while playing.

The less time children lose watching TV and other screens, the more they will engage in conversation with you and others around them.

Talking is crucial to help a child’s cognitive development. Here are some fun word games to play in the car.

3. Nursery Rhymes

Nursery rhymes are more than just fun to sing. They are highly stimulating and a great cognitive activity for preschoolers and toddlers.

They teach children language patterns and they develop vocabulary. Most importantly, they build a child’s auditory perceptual skills – such as auditory memory, discrimination, etc.

Expose your children to:

• classic nursery rhymes and songs
• poems
• finger rhymes
• action rhymes
• nonsense rhymes.

Learning nursery rhymes is an important aspect of pre-reading skills and will set children up for reading success later in school.

4. Thinking Games

Thinking is an important skill for adults and a skill that needs to be actively worked on. Many adults struggle to think outside the box, find solutions or think critically.

Thinking games aim to develop children’s higher-order and critical thinking skills.

These stimulate children to actively practise thinking.

There are various examples of thinking skills. Here are just a few:

• Predicting
• Summarizing
• Understanding cause and effect
• Forming opinions
• Deducing
• Thinking creatively

Here are some fun cognitive games to further develop kids’ mental skills.

5. Creative Activities

Children spend much of their time naturally engaging in creative activities, whether they are drawing, painting, moulding or creating something with waste materials or boxes. Even making up a game during fantasy play is a form of creative expression.

Whenever a child is using their creative mind they are building their cognitive skills.

Creativity is not really a skill you can teach, but rather a skill you can ignite.

What children need is a platform to be creative. They need materials, stimulation and opportunities. From there, the creative process is a natural one.

6. Problem-Solving Activities

Problem-solving is a skill that many older children and adults struggle with. There are few careers today that do not rely heavily on a person’s ability to solve problems.

This is a skill that can be taught from an early age with very simple problem-solving activities and fun games.

Young children often see problems as challenges to overcome.

7. Puzzles

Puzzles are one of my favourite activities for kids. They require so much concentration and effort, as well as perseverance to complete.

Children who are solving a puzzle are thinking deeply and building their intellectual capacity.

The most important thing to remember is that a puzzle should be challenging but doable. Choose one that is appropriate for a child’s age. The younger the child, the fewer and bigger the pieces should be.

The right puzzle is one that is challenging but doable, not one that makes a child frustrated.

As children get more confident with them, they will begin to seek out bigger, more complex puzzles.

8. Movement

Movement is an excellent activity for stimulating brain growth.

Movement develops neural pathways in children and vestibular movement affects learning to read and write later on.

Movement wakes up, resets and re-energises the brain. It helps a child’s development in two ways.

Firstly, developing gross motor and fine motor skills helps children with their overall development. Secondly, you can use movement breaks during any activity to reset children’s concentration.

Just two minutes of doing a physical activity or going for a run outside can allow children to continue to concentrate and finish the activity they were working on.

9. Symbolic Play 

Symbolic play is when children engage in pretend or make-believe play using objects to represent other objects. For example, a child who uses a block as a mobile phone.

Symbolic play is very natural to children and is a highly creative form of play that will develop their intellectual skills.

During this kind of play, children are constantly thinking of new ways to act out their world in order to make sense of it.

Symbolic play is the next step up from functional play, where a child will use an appropriate object – for example pretending to iron clothes with a toy iron.

Later on, when they pick up a block to use as an iron, it means their brains have developed the ability to use the block to represent something else. This is an advanced skill.

The only thing children need to engage in symbolic play is access to materials, toys, and plenty of free time.

10. Developmentally Appropriate Toys

A child’s environment can greatly impact how much stimulation they are receiving.

They don’t need any fancy toys or equipment – just basic educational toys, such as wooden blocks, Lego, playdough, books, construction materials and natural materials.

Try to vary children’s experiences by offering different tools. For example, introduce Lego and after a few days, swap the tub and offer wooden blocks instead. This will encourage your children to think of new and different ways to play and create.

Playdough is an excellent and highly educational material that is easy to make.

11. Free Play

Last but not least, free play is undoubtedly the most important tool to develop cognitive skills.

Play is what children do naturally throughout the day, and it’s essential for learning.

Everything children learn before the age of 6 will be primarily through play.

In order for this to happen, children need time to be able to play. Unfortunately, in modern times, they often need to sacrifice play time in order to attend extra activities.

Prioritize play in your home or classroom and let children engage in it freely.

Free play requires no adult intervention. All children need is the time and freedom to do it as they choose.

What are the 4 Stages of Cognitive Development?

Before stimulating cognitive development in preschoolers and toddlers, it’s important to understand which stage of thinking they are in and how their cognitive abilities evolve over time.

Jean Piaget was a French psychologist who created a theory of cognitive development. He outlined four stages of cognitive development, showing how children progress to more advanced thinking patterns as they grow.

The four stages are the sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational periods.

Toddlers and preschoolers are in the pre-operational period.

Here is a brief summary of the stages, summarized from the book “The Young Child in Context: A psycho-social perspective” by Marike de Witt.

This video also provides a great summary of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development.

The Sensorimotor Period (Infancy)

• This stage lasts from birth until around the age of 2.
• Babies primarily interact with their environment through sensory experiences and movement.
• They have not yet developed expressive and receptive language, so they do not associate words with images or objects.
• They don’t yet have a concept of time so they can only focus on the present moment, with no understanding of the past or future.
• At this stage, they are unable to plan.
• With time they learn that objects are permanent, so they realize that something may still be there even if it is not visible. They learn this through games such as peek-a-boo.
• They start imitating and engaging in dramatic or symbolic play.
• There are 6 sub-phases in the sensorimotor period.

The Pre-Operational Period (Toddlerhood and Preschool Age)

• This stage occurs between the ages of 2 to 7.
• It is named pre-operational because it is the stage before children begin to use operational thinking.
• It is divided into two main phases – pre-conceptual thought and intuitive thought.

Pre-Conceptual Thought (2-4 years)

• Children understand the world as they see it – from their own frame of reference.
• They form conclusions that may not be logical, such as believing the sun is alive because they are alive.
• They interpret language based on their own experiences and perspective.
• They know the world as they see and experience it.
• They view events as happening independently as they can’t really see a relationship between cause and effect.
• Children identify with their models. They imitate them and feel a sense of awe towards them.

Intuitive Thought (4-7 years)

• Most preschoolers and kindergarteners fall into this stage.
• Compared to the previous phase where children were very egocentric, they are now less egocentric. They no longer believe the world completely revolves around them.
• Children become more social.
• Words become part of their thinking process.
• They begin to coordinate their egocentric views with actual reality.
• They can only focus on one idea at a time and cannot yet grasp the full picture—for example, they can understand individual parts but struggle to see how they relate to one another.
• They may be able to count, but don’t yet have a concept of numbers or what they mean.
• They use language in the correct way but still attach their own meaning to it.

The Concrete Operational Period (School Age)

• Between ages 7 and 11, children enter the concrete operational stage, meaning they have a coherent cognitive system.
• Children develop the ability to engage in reversible thought processes, though they are still limited to thinking about concrete, tangible objects.
• They can categorize, classify and place items into hierarchies.

The Formal Operational Period (School Age)

• This period starts at around 11 years of age. Children are now able to think in an abstract and logical way and no longer rely on concrete thinking.
• They can now make logical deductions, think abstractly, and consider possibilities or hypotheses.

How Young Children Think

Marike de Witt shares these examples of how young children typically think.

As children progress through these stages, their thinking matures from the examples below to more advanced patterns.

1. Language is the most important of the semiotic functions because it is used to represent objects or express actions and thoughts.
2. Children begin to use two kinds of mental representations – symbols and signs (e.g. when they draw or engage in symbolic play).
3. Children imitate a caregiver even if they are not in their presence. Another version of this is verbal recall (e.g. when they “miaow” even though they can no longer see the cat.)
4. They are egocentric, which means they are not fully able to see things from someone else’s perspective or put themselves “in their shoes.”
5. Children are focused on and only really concerned with their immediate surroundings. They don’t really think about objectives or situations that are remote in time and space.
6. They struggle to make comparisons between things (e.g. bigger, smaller). They see each thing separately.
7. They are unable to distinguish between psychological and physical occurrences. They don’t know the difference between what is internal and what is external. (e.g. seeing thinking as part of speaking).
8. Children often attribute human characteristics to objects. They believe objects can feel or act like human beings (e.g. believing the doll is upset).
9. Children’s reasoning is not sound. They may not see the relationship between two things or group unrelated things together (e.g. “The girl doesn’t have a name because she can’t talk”). They may not see the relationship between cause and effect (e.g “He’s sick because he didn’t go to school“).
10. They can group and classify items based on one criterion, such as shape, but struggle to apply multiple criteria simultaneously (e.g., shape and colour). This also relates to seriation (arranging different objects according to size). They can categorize the objects into big and small but not order them perfectly in a series of biggest to smallest.
11. Children don’t necessarily have a number concept, even if they can count to 10. In order to have a concept of numbers, they must understand the ordinal properties of numbers, the cardinal properties and the conservation of numbers. They also need to understand that numbers can form different wholes through addition and multiplication, and be broken down by subtraction and division.