Children make decisions every day. Some of them may be inconsequential while others possess a big impact. Who shall I invite to the birthday party? Which shoes go best with these jeans? Shall I play with that kid whom no one likes?
At a younger age, children’s choices are mainly based on personal preferences. But while they grow older, their choices can have a great impact on their safety and lifestyle. When parents, teachers and early childhood education instructors provide children with the direction for making decisions, they become prepared for making bigger life choices as they mature. Learning decision-making skills through fun activities helps in transforming a potentially stressful learning process into an enjoyable pastime. Below is a list of fun activities that will strengthen your child’s decision-making skills.
- Role-Playing
Role-playing is an activity in which kids are encouraged to act out roles for exploring a particular scenario. Children often fantasise about themselves being superheroes, teachers, doctors or parents. When they grew older, children enjoy playing dramatic roles such as performing in skits or staging puppet shows.
Recent research has shown that children practice decision-making skills when they perform in dramatic interests. Apart from just empathising, kids also get an opportunity to experience what it is like to make decisions on behalf of another person under a different set of circumstances. It broadens children’s minds and encourages them to consider the varied motivations of people and the choices they make.
- Debate
Debate is one of the most predominant ways to practice critical thinking among older kids. This allows them to feel that they can disagree with one another. Debates can be performed by parents at home by reading out an article in a newspaper or magazine with their kids and asking them their opinions on the same. To make it simple, look and analyse a painting together and discuss what you both like and dislike about the artwork.
Along with these, major after school programs in India such as Kumon also organise debate competitions on various topics that help kids to enhance critical-thinking skills. You can also deepen the thinking of children by asking them why and how they like or dislike something. Using concrete evidence to support opinions acts as fundamental for thoughtful decision-making among children.
- Book Talks
A love for reading and storytelling encourages students to identify situations and characters. This can be performed with younger children by recounting a story or asking them questions about how they can do something differently from the character. This results in deeper thinking among kids related to choices. You can also create and lead a discussion that explores the various consequences of these decisions so that children can relate the situations they read about to their lives.
- Learning While Playing
Children learning decision-making skills through entertaining activities display positive outcomes. They equip kids with the ability of decision-making based on their values, knowledge, and judgement which is healthy and empowering. After school programs in India help kids know the difference between an emotion-based response and an intellect-based, reasoned response that could help them make life-altering decisions.
- ● Outdoor Games
Outdoor games encourage children to strategize and they can make rapid-fire decisions while engaging socially. There are games that can be played in groups such as tag and hide-and-seek. With continuous play, children can develop tactics that increase their chances of winning the game. They also make decisions regarding game rules and the outcomes for breaking the rules. For older kids, organized sports develop and provide a setting for making predictions, making decisions in a split second and working out more complex problems between a group of friends or a team.
- Wrapping Up
Problem-solving activities that children perform today will affect the pivotal decisions they will eventually need to make as teenagers and adults. Therefore, it is recommended by Kumon to get children engaged with high-interest games. This will motivate and educate them to learn vital decision-making skills.
Kumon is the best early childhood education program in India that develops decision-making capabilities among kids by making them face real-world situations. For more information on Kumon, visit the website.
