Cognitive Stimulation Workshops for Children
Cognitive stimulation workshops for children include activities and techniques designed to train and improve their intellectual abilities.
Such training helps the academic development of both children and teenagers. It also helps them to be more agile, have a better memory, as well as learn more effectively.
For children to perform well at school, they’ll need to be able to stay focused, have a good memory, and learn to reason well.
You can get all of these things from cognitive stimulation workshops. Best of all, they’re delivered in a fun way.
What is Cognitive Stimulation?
Cognition refers to everything involved in learning and knowledge. It’s the ability to process information. Such knowledge could be a learning process, perception, or an experience.
At the same time, cognition involves memory, problem-solving, decision making, feelings, and attention. All of these allow us to recognize loved ones, imagine future events, and remember the past.
Cognitive stimulation is a neuropsychological technique that aims to boost children’s mental capacity. With the right cognitive learning methods, it can greatly improve their quality of life.
Of course, such stimulation is useful at all stages of life. However, for babies and children, it can greatly boost their memory, attention levels, and reasoning abilities.
The Importance of Cognitive Stimulation Workshops
How important these workshops are depends largely on the plasticity of children’s brains. Such plasticity means that children adapt easily to the demands around them. At the same time, it makes learning easier and makes them more sensitive to cognitive stimulation.
A workshop with a good cognitive stimulation program should include mental exercises which stimulate different neuronal activation patterns.
Activating these patterns repeatedly reinforces existing connections between neurons, as well as generating new synapses.
Most Common Exercises in Cognitive Stimulation Workshops
Of course, these depend entirely on the workshop as well as the abilities of the children involved. In many cases, the same activities can be done at home. Some of the most common exercises are:
- Orientation exercises. Ask the children to draw a picture about a particular place or the people around them.
- Language exercises. Name, repeat, and make lists of objects and words.
- Reading exercises. Work with short texts or talks where one of the words doesn’t fit. Another option is to list off a few words and the children have to write related sentences.
- Recognition exercises. One example is to ask the children to describe an object. Another is to show them two very similar pictures and ask them to spot the differences.
At What Age Should Cognitive Stimulation Start?
Human beings are social by nature. As a result, they develop through social relations and communication with others.
It’s a good idea to start cognitive stimulation with children from the very start. Up until the age of six years old, children are more sensitive to cognitive stimulation.
9 Benefits of Cognitive Stimulation Workshops
- Encourages autonomy.
- Improves the quality of their interpersonal relationships.
- Inspires motivation and prevents boredom.
- They learn to reason and logically connect sequences.
- They learn to control and focus their attention, which also results in better memory. By boosting their memory, this helps in the absorption and acquirement of knowledge.
Advice for Parents
Parents should try to make sure that each area of their children’s development is boosted as much as possible. But don’t force it. It’s also important to try to keep negative influences to a minimum which could impact their cognitive development.
In the first years of life, early cognitive stimulation is a slow, arduous, and practically invisible process.
In contrast to the ability to talk or walk, this process can be difficult to observe. However, as parents, it’s important to make cognitive stimulation a routine.
Your children need a lot of attention and this needs to come from the family. This is especially true in the first years of life when children haven’t started school yet.
Therefore, a family that is involved in early cognitive stimulation plays a very important role. Parents are the primary educators of their children, as well as their first source of love and affection.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
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- Ministerior de sanidad, servicios sociales e igualdad. G. de E. (2012). Ejercicios prácticos de estimulación cognitiva. Centro de Referencia Estatal de Atencion a Personas Con Enfermedad de Alzheimer y Otras Demencias. Salamanca.