Posted on 09/22/2014 at 10:11 AM by Liz Determan
Problem solving and reasoning are important in both literacy and mathematics. To support children’s problem solving and reasoning consider the following recommendations:
- Facilitate children’s play – support exploratory play with challenging and varied materials. Encourage children to talk about what they are seeing or doing.
- Help children to understand the difference between guessing and knowing – assist children with simple experiments where they make a prediction and then test it.
- Foster categorization skills – provide lots of materials to compare and sort by a variety of attributes.
- Encourage children to think before answering – learn to “freeze” and then think about the best answer.
- Model and promote scientific reasoning using the language of problem solving – demonstrate good habits of problem solvers.