Funny pictures for the development of the child's thinking

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Back in 2004, a very common story happened to me. Straight from laboratory tables loaded with PCR machines, centrifuges, test tubes and microscopes, in a hot frenzy of writing articles on bioremediation of saline soils, I found myself in a room with rattles, baby books and a small child.

The use of rattles and nipples turned out to be more or less simple, but with the "educational games" everything seemed much more interesting. Is it possible to actually accelerate the development of a child's thinking abilities, and how to do it?

To answer this question, I left my career as a scientist and went to work as a teacher of additional education. What you read next is the result, sorry, of experiments on children (don't worry, not a single experimental child was hurt).

(illustration from the magazine "Funny Pictures", 1983, No. 4)

If the task is to develop thinking, you need to understand what it is.

There are several types of thinking:

1. Verbal and logical thinking … Aristotle figured it out with him. It is based on our favorite elementary mental operations (analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization, abstraction) and elementary inferences (deduction, induction, analogy (traduction)).

2. Visual-figurative thinking (operating with images).

3. Object-action thinking ("Thinking with hands" based on the sensory-perceptual process).

4. Creative thinking (the most difficult term, in fact, is the ability to make non-standard decisions).

5. Abstract-symbolic (operating with mathematical codes, formulas and operations that cannot be touched or imagined).

Therefore, in order to develop the child in the process of entertainment, it is necessary to build into the process of play the need to solve a problem that is solved with the help of these types of thinking. Fortunately, it turned out to be not so difficult (reflections were pushed forward a lot by a thick filing of old magazines "Veselye Kartinki", which contained a wealth of material for analyzing the possibilities of using infographics for children).

Since I myself am 100% visual, the techniques turned out to be visual. They apply to children from 4 years old and older (my oldest students, on whom the techniques worked, were 18, I did not check on adults; for specific tasks, a specific age is indicated). The examples given are mostly from the field of biology (guess why), but the techniques themselves can be applied to different areas of knowledge. Based on these techniques, we were able to prepare an interactive city tour, a theatrical performance, elements of an exhibition dedicated to religion, classes in psychology, chemistry and physics.

So here are the techniques for developing specific types of thinking.

Techniques # 1 and # 2 - "analysis" and "synthesis"

In fact, we need to teach how to disassemble the whole into parts and assemble it back (without the appearance of spare parts, preferably).

Example: the study of complex natural systems, such as the biogeocenosis of a pond.

And, finally, objective-active thinking (technique # 15).

Reception number 15 "organoleptic"

For many people, the ability to touch, smell, touch or lick something is not associated with thinking. Nevertheless, Mikhail Yuryevich Zabrodin developed a theory of the sensory-perceptual process, according to which the process of signal perception is associated with the decision-making process. At the macro level, this is the knowledge of an object through manipulating it.

Any museum of entertaining physics can provide a lot of examples. By rubbing amber on wool, you can demonstrate the emergence of electricity. The electrical discharge produces ozone, which can be sensed through the characteristic odor. The human body is also a conductor of electricity, you can feel it with your tongue by attaching the contacts of the battery to it. Electricity can also be felt by, for example, putting on and taking off a synthetic fiber sweater.

Unfortunately, I, a despicable visual, did not manage to come up with methods of how to develop abstract-symbolic thinking in children. So dear dads and mothers-programmers, I will be glad if you share your thoughts on this matter. At the very least, it is not possible to develop it with funny pictures due to the contradiction in the definition of the term.

Of course, all of these techniques do not have to be used separately. They can and should be combined. The result of this combination is a game about infectious diseases "Beware of microbes!" (you can download it and share your thoughts on the game in particular and trying to connect the game and learning in general).

As I said, I had students of very different ages. I can tell the statistics only for high school students, since only with them it was possible to organize a more or less representative sample and a control group. Details of calculations and graphs can be found here. In short, the conclusion is unambiguous: the students of the experimental group, as compared to the control group, had an increase in their ability to solve problems in a variety of ways. Ten years of observation of younger children also suggests that positive changes are taking place (but, unfortunately, in the absence of a control group, I cannot give statistics). That is, it is possible to develop thinking, and the techniques proposed in the article are suitable for this.

Finally - a little advice on how to make sure that you are not running after your child, trying to feed him with chewed information, but he was running after you, demanding "dad / mom, come on again!" Run away from him! Hide information. Make it a reward. As George Martin said in Game of Thrones, "When one person builds a wall, the other immediately needs to know what's on the other side." It is necessary to surround educational information with a halo of riddles, create obstacles on the way to its extraction, surprise - the children have an interest, a desire to achieve results. And all why? Because for almost the entire history of mankind, only curious boys and girls survived while dad ran after the mammoth, and mom swept poisonous spiders out of the cave. Believe me, I have not seen children in whom this ancient curiosity died. But why some have hidden it so far that they cannot find it - this is a completely, completely different story.