by Hanna Vock

 

The following article was written in 2004 and published in a conference documentation. The occasion was the conference „The competent child. Between educational planning and self-dynamics“. The conference was organised by the Department of Day Care Facilities for Children in the Diocesan Caritas Association for the Archdiocese of Cologne.
The structure „Guideline – Concretisation – Practical Suggestions“ was given by the conference organisers, the contents were provided by me.

Shortly after the publication of the conference documentation, a day care centre director called me and reported that her team had thoroughly worked through the article at a team day. Afterwards, the colleagues unanimously stated that the team now had a much clearer and more uniform understanding of cognitive support and that they wanted to implement many suggestions in their future work or pay more attention to them.

See also: Checklist: Cognitive Advancement

And here the article begins:

Thinking Is Fun
Cognitive Promotion at Kindergarten

What I like to do, I do well. Keeping children having fun, enjoying independent thinking and supporting them in developing their thinking skills is an important and fascinating task for educators in the context of holistic support. Along the way, this can also contribute to the children’s later success at school.

Here, first of all, is a rough overview of the guidelines, which will be fleshed out further below and provided with practical suggestions:

Basic prerequisites for development

1. respectful interest in the children’s thinking as a basic pedagogical attitude
2. good cognitive development needs humour
3. the expression of thoughts needs a trusting atmosphere
4. developing possibilities of expression

Learning conditions for cognitive development

5. cognitive development is embedded in the holistic activities of the children
6. kindergarten teachers identify and plan cognitive development as a specific area of development.
7. cognitive development includes different levels of research, thinking and cognition
8. Cognitive development is best achieved through content that interests the children.
9. cognitive enhancement also means: letting children participate in how others solve problems by thinking.
10. cognitive development includes the teaching and development of cognitive „tools“.

Structural conditions

11. internal differentiation must be possible
12. exploration of the wider environment must be possible
13. cooperation with parents is important

Guideline 1:
Interest in the children’s thinking as a basic pedagogical attitude

Concretisation 1:
Children’s thinking is not visible from the outside. We can assume that every child has interesting thoughts every day.

Practical suggestions:

• • Show interest in the children’s ideas, thoughts and topics, ask about them.
  • Give plenty of time and space to the conversation with the children.

Concretisation 2:

Consider the children’s independent thoughts as an important expression of their learning, their engagement with the environment. The children’s thoughts provide information about their developmental process.

Practical suggestions:

• • Taking children’s independent thinking seriously and valuing it.
  • When children express their ideas and thoughts, we can „pick them up where they are“ with our support impulses.
  • Pick up the children’s ideas, discuss them with them and help them to realise them.
  • The children’s thoughts provide information about how well they understand what is happening in the kindergarten and in their other environment.
  • Include the child’s expressed thoughts in developmental diagnostics.

Concretisation 3:
Accessing children’s thoughts means finding out what moves them cognitively and emotionally.

Practical suggestions:

• • Pay attention to the emotional parts and the cognitive parts of the expressed thoughts.
  • Give the children respectful feedback. Asking questions to make sure they have been understood correctly.

Guideline 2:
Good kognitive development needs humour

Concretisation 1:
Thinking is fun when it is not strained and dogged, but light and easy.

Practical suggestions:

• • Making mistakes must be allowed.
  • Defeats, failures, mistakes do not bring scolding, but comfort.
  • As a kindergarten teacher, deal with your own ignorance, mistakes or failures without embarrassment in front of the children.

Concretisation 2:
Not wanting to know everything beforehand. Thinking and researching always have an open end; surprises are possible and make up a large part of the attraction.

Practical suggestions:

• • For many questions and problems there are various good answers and solutions. No one knows them all. Keep an open mind!
  • Allow fun in discovery and feel it yourself if possible.

Concretisation 3:
Thinking is fun when we are fun while thinking.

Practical suggestions:

• • Create an atmosphere where good-natured jokes and joking have their place. Good jokes train the ability to think. Understanding a joke or even making it up yourself requires grasping the unexpected, the grotesque, the funny about a situation.

Guideline 3:
Expressing thoughts needs a trusting atmosphere

Concretisation 1:

Shy and still insecure children should also be given the opportunity to express their thoughts. For this, the child needs stable trust with the listeners.

Practical suggestions:

• • Do not allow laughing and derogatory remarks.
  • Help children to express their thoughts by being attentive, calm, patient and asking gently.
  • Repeat the insecure child’s statement positively.
  • Encourage shy children to speak if there is a suggestion that they could contribute at this moment.

Concretisation 2:
Even unusual thoughts that deviate from the mainstream may be expressed. For this, the child needs to trust in the kindergarten teacher that she also finds such thoughts important.

Practical suggestions:

• • Challenge deviant, unconventional thoughts.
  • Frequently ask: Could it be completely different, could we do it differently?
  • Validate good unusual ideas.

Guideline 4:
Develop possibilities of expression

Concretisation 1:

Children can only express their thoughts if they have appropriate means of expression. The communication, the conversation, the exchange of ideas and thoughts between child, group and kindergartn teacher is the richer, the more differentiated the possibilities of expression are.

Practical suggestions:

• • Encourage spoken language.
  • Encouraging body language, facial expressions and gestures.
  • Encourage painting and drawing skills.

Guideline 5:
Cognitive promotion is embedded in holistic activities of the children

Concretisation 1:
Every game, every work, every activity has cognitive parts.

Practical suggestions:

• • Children immersed in play, children actively and enthusiastically playing, children thinking do not disturb. They learn intensively.
  • Ensure children have large, undivided periods of time for free play.
  • Help children to implement their own ideas.

Concretisation 2:

Every game, every activity has different phases that require mental activity:
– Emergence of the desire to play and the first idea for a game.
– Possibly contacting other children and advertising the idea.
– Negotiating and concretising the idea, negotiating rules and/or roles.
– Procurement of materials.
– Draw up a plan, decide on a story.
– Acting out the play.
– Overcoming difficulties.
– Introducing new ideas.
– Evaluation of these ideas, decision.
– Action of the game.
– Ending the game (in agreement or in dispute).
– Individual evaluation of the game (was nice / was stupid). An evaluation always takes place, even if the child does not comment on it.
– Reasons for this evaluation.
– (Internal or external) conclusion for further games („I won’t play with him again“, „I can’t do that“, „the game is boring“, etc.).

Practical suggestions:

• • Observe how the children master the different phases.
  • Evaluate what causes good play ideas to fail (again and again?). Work on these phases with the children, talk to them about the observed difficulties, reflect together with them; possibly give concrete help.
  • Work towards the children having as many experiences of success as possible (= beautiful play situations that were worth the effort and encourage them to continue playing).
  • Pay attention to differences in ability: Particularly gifted children can find themselves in a situation in the group where the game ideas, the course of the game and the game results only rarely satisfy them. This reduces their desire to engage in joint play. They need adequate play partners at least some of the time.

Concretisation 3:

The children give each other many impulses. However, this is not enough for the children to sufficiently understand themselves and their environment. The task of the adults, and thus also of the kindergarten teacher, is also and to a large extent to provide additional and well-considered stimuli for the children’s cognitive development.

Practical suggestions:

• • Activities and projects with a high cognitive content are important.
  • Involve experts (parents, grandparents, representatives of various professions and hobbies).
  • Provide materials for cognitive promotion: Thinking and strategy games, experimental material, collections of interesting things, books, reference books, internet, stories, puzzles, games with letters, numbers, abstract shapes….

Guideline 6:
Kindergarten teachers identify and plan cognitive development as a specific area of development.

Concretisation 1:

Cognitive development happens along the way. However, fostering children’s cognitive development requires paying special attention to this area. ‚Thinking tools‘ develop through use.

Practical suggestions:

• • Continually motivate children to reflect on what they have experienced, to question critically, to spin out ideas, to solve difficult tasks and puzzles.

Concretisation 2:

Cognitive promotion includes support in the acquisition of knowledge (factual and experiential knowledge) and the development of thinking skills. Both are important.

Practical suggestions:

• • Check the cognitive parts of games, tasks and other activities to see what new knowledge the children can acquire and to what extent they can use it to practise their thinking.
  • Enrich games and game ideas with additional cognitive stimuli, for example, vary the rules, do not read stories to the end but let the children think up a possible ending.

Concretisation 3:

Children reach very different levels of thinking and general knowledge at pre-school age. This may be due to different stimulation and support in the family and/or differences in giftedness.

Practical suggestions:

• • Determine for each child whether his or her general knowledge is particularly low or also particularly extensive. Give the parents feedback and tips for support.
  • Research for each child which levels of thinking they have mastered. (See Guideline 7.)
  • Formulate developmental goals.

Concretisation 4:

Develop elements for everyday life in the kindergarten that are particularly suitable for cognitive promotion.

Practical suggestions:

• • Regularly look at picture books and tell stories in small groups. Use the pictures and stories as a basis for conversation and ask questions of varying difficulty about the content in the conversations.
  • Frequently stimulate conversations on specific topics in the whole group or in small groups. Examples: „What is snow anyway?“ / „Where do eggs come from?“ / „What do you want for Christmas?“
  • Talk regularly and in detail in the group and in small groups about experiences in the kindergarten.
  • Give detailed information about plans and experiences that lie in the future so that the older children can form a mental image of them, which they can then compare with the real experiences.
  • Have children report on their activities: „How did you do that?“ / „Why did you do it that way?“ This encourages the children to mentally process their actions afterwards.
  • Work out rules for speaking in the group.

Guideline 7:
Cognitive promotion includes different levels of research, thinking and recognising.

Concretisation 1:

Accumulating knowledge and experience.

Practical suggestions:

• • Small or larger projects that aim at a result offer the best guarantee that knowledge and experiences are combined. Knowledge is experienced as applicable. Acquiring new knowledge seems to make sense in order to realise one’s own projects.
  • Projects should be used to ask and think from all sides and to seek new knowledge.

Concretisation 2: 

Understanding logical connections. Make causes and effects conscious and separate them mentally.

Practical suggestions:

• • Inquire in all kinds of situations. Have the children understood cause and effect?
  • Did they really understand why something (came) to be this way and not another way? Or why it has to be that way?

Concretisation 3:

Learning to understand causes and effects of their own behaviour and the behaviour of others. Learning to think strategically. (What can / must I do to achieve a goal?).

Practical suggestions:

• • In children’s assemblies, talk about conflicts, about behaviour and its effects. Offer explanatory patterns that the children can understand.
  • Pay attention to whether a child can already take the point of view of his/her counterpart.
  • Example: Why doesn’t Lisa want to play with Tina anymore? Have they both understood this cognitively?
  • Discuss strategies with children: What could I (Tina) do so that Lisa will play with me again tomorrow?

Concretisation 4:

(Critically) evaluate things and processes. Give reasons for the evaluation.

Practical suggestions:

• • Take children’s evaluations and judgements seriously, value their power of judgement.
  • Encourage children to give evaluations.
  • Children do not always have to justify their evaluations, but they should be able to learn to do so. It increases their ability to influence, they appear competent when they can do it well.

Concretisation 5:
Use imagination; develop own ideas. Think creatively and divergently.

Practical suggestions:

• • A creative thinking process often starts with a good question or a good story. Ask questions that stimulate thinking.
  • Make imaginary journeys.
  • Think up play situations, stories.
  • Find variations: Re-texting songs, changing stories.
  • Use role play and theatre play to develop imagination.

Concretisation 6:
Present own ideas, stories, experiences, put them up for discussion.

Practical suggestions:

• • In order to experience that others find their ideas good, the children should learn to present them well. Some children have a natural talent for this, others need a lot of encouragement and practice.
  • Pay attention to understandable, precise expression, help the children with this.
  • Practise self-confidence (posture, eye contact, use of voice…).
  • Guide the children to be brief in certain situations, to say what is important.
  • Help the children to overcome fear of failure or embarrassment. A good way to do this is to organise a series of small successes.

Concretisation 7:

Learning to think more and more complexly. Complexly grasp several features of situations.

Practical suggestions:

• • In many situations use sentences such as: „But that could also be the reason.“ / „And what does that have to do with it?“ / „But it is also important what the child was thinking.“ / „And the wind, can that also be important in this?“
  • Play games where several features (e.g. colour, shape and size) need to be considered at the same time.

Guideline 8:
Cognitive enhancement is best achieved with content that interests the children.

Concretisation 1:

Of interest are things, activities and topics that are currently significant for the children’s lives.

Practical suggestions:

• • Many things that are related to kindergarten attendance,
  • events in the family,
  • with the imminent start of school,
  • friendships, conflicts, dissatisfaction among the children, etc.
  • and many other things.

Concretisation 2:

Of interest are things, activities and topics that are skillfully and excitingly presented by others (children or adults).
Children can develop their thinking skills on any topic / area of knowledge.

Practical suggestions:

• • Children are curious by nature, they want to understand, grasp, try out, imitate, experience new things.
  • In their work with the children, the kindergarten teachers should focus on things and topics which they themselves are fascinated by. Then they can also engage the children.
  • Look for suitable experts, create a file of experts. Suitable experts are those who are confident in their work, in their field, who are enthusiastic themselves, who can explain things well and simply, who have a sense of humour, who get on well with children, who are likeable to the children.
  • Children who can do something that interests the others and who can show / teach it to the other children are also experts.

 

Guideline 9:
Cognitive promotion also means: letting children participate in how others solve problems by thinking.

Concretisation 1:

Children learn from other children in the group and from the kindergarten teachers how they use their „thinking tools“.

Practical suggestions:

• • Make it possible for the children to experience their own thinking processes.
  • The kindergarten teacher explains how she came to a conclusion or decision, for example: „At first I was going to do it like this, but then I realised that it doesn’t work like that, so I had to think about it some more…“.
  • Encourage the children to also let their thinking processes come out. Questions like: „How did you come up with that?“ / „How did you think of that?“ / „How do you know?“.
  • The kindergarten teacher lets the children know where she got her information (for example, on a project topic). „I got it from this book.“ / „I called the fire brigade and the man on the phone told me…“.

Guideline 10:
Cognitive enhancement involves teaching and developing cognitive „tools“.

Concretisation 1:

Investigate and explore things.

Practical suggestions:

• • Provide a variety of materials and tools – including things (discarded equipment from parents or from the bulky waste) that can be taken apart. Consider the safety of the children!

Concretisation 2:
Use tools sensibly.

Practical suggestions:

• • Teach the children to use pencils, scissors and glue, for example, but also many other tools sensibly and skilfully, for example scales, the telephone, hammer and pliers…

Concretisation 3:
Make and check assumptions, experiment.

Practical suggestions:

• • Ask the children to make assumptions, for example, about which objects can float and which cannot, and what the reasons might be.
  • Carry out simple scientific or technical experiments with the children; make assumptions that can be checked in the experiment.

Concretisation 4:

Thinking about the future; planning and making plans. Weighing up risks.

Practical suggestions:

• • Thinking together about what can / must be done to achieve a certain goal and in what order it should be done. Consider who can do what best.
  • Consider what could go wrong, what could be difficult and what can be done then.
  • Consider what can be done preventively to avoid mishaps.

Concretisation 5:

Exchange knowledge and ideas, collate, discuss, possibly coordinate.

Practical suggestions:

• • Collect all knowledge on a topic, a task, a problem. Motto: Together we know more.
  • Get to know brainstorming as a method. All ideas are first listened to on an equal footing, even the seemingly crazy and strange ones. Only then is it considered and decided which ideas should be realised.

Concretisation 6:

Ask questions, gather knowledge.

Practical suggestions:

• • It is good for the children to experience how adults make themselves smart by asking questions (role model effect).
  • Children should be made aware at an early age that you don’t have to know everything, but that it is good to know methods for acquiring knowledge in a targeted way. (Ask other people, ask experts, look in books and on the internet).

Concretisation 7:

Record ideas and results. Draw plans.

Practical suggestions:

• • Make first experiences in drawing plans: What is in the outdoor area and where it is; how the rooms are situated one behind the other; the own way to the kindergarten.
  • Draw play plans and bouncy boxes on the floor.
  • Design a table duty roster or similar so that children can „read“ it.
  • Using boxes that can be ticked, record how many days are left until the overnight stay in the kindergarten or until another highlight of the kindergarten year.
  • Create a picture book together from a story that the children have made up themselves, which can be taken to hand again and again – and thus attach great value to the story.
  • Before baking biscuits, draw the recipe so that the children can find their way independently.

Concretisation 8:

• • Actively support early numeracy, literacy and/or writing. These are important cognitive tools – and some children strive to acquire these tools early on their own accord.
  • It frustrates particularly gifted children when parents and kindergarten teachers exclude these areas from support for fear of doing something wrong. Schools must be expected to adapt to the different developmental levels of children.

Practical suggestions:

• • Keep letters and numbers accessible to children from different materials (wood, as puzzles, as magnetic figures…).
  • Write words and sentences that are important in everyday kindergarten life and that might interest the children in large block letters.
  • Tell children who are interested the names of the letters and explain what sound they stand for.
  • Write down words or set counting and arithmetic tasks for children who are interested.
  • Confirm the drawing of letters and numbers as positively as the drawing of, for example, flowers or rockets.
  • Play rhyming games.
  • Look for words beginning with A, O, D, etc.
  • Let children read who can already read. They want to use and build on the newly learned skill.

Guideline 11:
Internal differentation must be possible.

Concretisation 1:
Both intensive discussions and certain offers and project work are best realised when staffing and rooms allow small groups to play and learn together undisturbed.

Practical suggestions:

• • Do small group work whenever possible.
  • Support different group compositions for activities and project work: according to interest, ability, sympathy, prior knowledge…

Concretisation 2:

Provide targeted support for children who think and acquire knowledge particularly slowly and effortfully (and perhaps already reluctantly).

Practical suggestions:

• • Adjust activities and questions to the level and pace of the children so that they achieve success for themselves and do not lose (or perhaps rediscover) the fun of thinking.

Concretisation 3:

Provide targeted support for children who think and aquire knowledge particularly quickly, easily and effectively.

Practical suggestions:

• • Adjust activities and questions to the level and pace of the children so that they are sufficiently challenged and do not lose the fun of thinking.
  • Don’t shy away from particularly challenging activities; for example, demanding roles in drama, difficult experiments, organising birthday parties independently, depending on the children’s talents.

Guideline 12:
Exploring the wider environment must be possible.

Concretisation 1:
The district, the village, the surrounding nature, the nearest forest offer inexhaustible stimuli for the children’s cognitive development.

Practical suggestions:

• • Make many excursions and explorations.
  • Talk intensively and humorously about what you all have seen and experienced.
  • Draw inspiration for further knowledge acquisition from what you and the children have experienced: What did we not understand? What do we still want to find out? Who can we ask?
  • The kindergarten environment is full of experts. Many of them are happy to explain to the children what they are doing if you go and ask nicely. (The forest worker with the tree-clearing machine; the florist who makes bouquets or wreaths; the stonemason next to the cemetery, the old woman who sweeps the pavement…).

Concretisation 2:
Exploratory walks with some children („Let’s see what we discover“) should be possible spontaneously and without difficulties.

Practical suggestions:

• • Parents should know that going out without prior notice is part of the kindergarten’s concept.
  • Opportunities should be able to be used spontaneously. („I saw that the roof is being tiled on the building site.“ / „… that the farmer is just taking the potatoes out of the ground. We can go and pick up potatoes and cook them later.“)

Guideline 13:
Cooperation with parents is important.

Concretisation 1:
Parents of kindergarten children have an overwhelming importance in the cognitive development of their children. What is missed at an early age is difficult to make up for later.

Practical suggestions:

• • Parents should, if necessary, always be reminded of the importance of daily detailed conversations with their children.
  • Parents should always be given tips on what they can / must teach and explain to their children.
  • Books and games from the kindergarten can be borrowed by parents.

Concretisation 2:

In kindergarten we only experience a section of the children’s cognitive abilities and interests.

Practical suggestions:

• • In conversation with parents, kindergarten teachers can add to the picture of the child and his or her cognitive interests. Some children hide certain cognitive abilities (for example, being able to read) or certain interests because they believe that there is no room for it in kindergarten.

 

Date of publication in German: October 2021
Copyright © Hanna Vock, see imprint.