Upping Those Problem Solving Skills

Upping Those Problem Solving Skills

If you have been in the classroom or in education for the last 15-20 years, you have, undoubtedly, seen a shift in the students. With the increased availability of technology (desktop computers to laptop computers to smart phones to smart watches), students have had to rely less on their own skills to find information. Items like encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauruses, and atlases have been replaced by search engines like Google, sites like Wikipedia. Once upon a time (and really not that long ago), a student needed to take a trip to their school or public library to complete a research project. Now they can sit in the comfort of the classroom or home and everything they need is right at their fingertips. They can search archives of news articles, magazine articles, and professional journals, book reviews, you name it.  Now, don’t get us wrong. We here at Speech and Smile love technology, and in fact, use it daily. We see the great advantages of it. But we can also see how it has changed children.

I think we would all agree that, if you have to work for something, it takes on more meaning to you. For example, you are more apt to take special care of an item that you purchased with hard earned money than if someone just gave you the item. You see more of the value in said item. As technology has advanced over the past decade, so has its availability to the masses. We are seeing students younger and younger with smartphones and smart watches. In this uncertain world, it has become increasingly important for parents to be able to get a hold of their kids when they are out and about, and vice versa. We agree with that. But with these smart tools, kids at younger and younger ages are able to access information at the drop of a hat. Gone are the days of needing to know the definition of a word and looking it up in a dictionary. Now, we just google it. And a side effect of this is a general lack of problem solving skills in our kids. This is a concern because those kids will grow to be adults, and if they don’t have problem solving skills as adults, the world is going to be a rough place for them.

We don’t believe that the answer is taking away technology. That would be futile as well as nearly impossible. So the key lies in promoting activities with our kids that help increase their problem solving skills. Of course you know that we are strong advocates of play here at Speech and Smile, so we naturally turn to play ideas to help our kids, from the youngest to the oldest, up their problem solving skills. 

For the youngest kids, babies and toddlers, the goal will be to help them see cause and effect and to increase their spatial reasoning. Some great activities would be:

Stacking and nesting blocks

Chunky puzzles

Peek-a-boo books/pop-up books/flap lifting books

Peek-a-boo in real life or with their toys

Shape shorting activities

Toys with buttons, spinners, twisters, etc.

All of these types of toys and activities allow kids to explore what happens when they do something. It teaches them the idea that they can control an event just by their actions. These ideas can lead to hours of fun for the kids but also great learning moments.

As toddlers move into their preschool era, we still want to give them practice with cause and effect and spatial reasoning, but we want to dive a little deeper. They should start experiencing more exploration, working with the concept of trial and error, and starting to develop their critical thinking skills. As they age, their play in this area should start easy and move to more complex. Some great activities for this age group would be:

Puzzles (maybe a little more challenging than the baby ones)

Treasure hunts

Matching games (as in trying to find cards where the pictures match as set out in a grid, turning them over, remembering where they are)

Fort building

The floor is lava

Duplo lego building

Chunky block building

These activities give kids the chance to make decisions and solve simple, no stress problems. Like problem solving in a really safe atmosphere, where there is no risk, just room to grow in those skills.

Our last group is school-aged kids. They will be practicing all of the aforementioned skills, getting more advanced as they mature. Some great activities for this age group are:

Jigsaw Puzzles (depending on the age, they could be doing 300, 500, or 1000 piecers)

Word or number puzzles (crossword, word searches, Wordle, cryptograms, sudoku, kakuro, etc)

Building challenges (legos, blocks, bridges, boats that float, egg drop, gingerbread houses, lincoln logs, erector sets, etc.)

Hidden Picture (ala Highlights Magazine)

Science experiments

Cooking experiments

For school-aged kids, we are looking to ramp up their independence, their self-reliance. We want them to be experimenting with figuring out how things work, why things work the way they do, why some things work well and other things don’t. We want them to stick with tasks, even when they get challenging. To really work on problem solving skills, we want to move away from instant gratification, knowledge at our fingertips and to move toward focusing on a task, even if it is challenging, even if mistakes are made, even if it seems hard. Only when they start experiencing these feelings and working through them can they come out on the other side, proud in the fact that they were able to persevere and figure things out on their own. If we don’t want problem solving skills to become a lost art, we must gently force kids out of their comfort zones, and help them to think outside the box. It’s going to be one of the best lessons you can teach them.  

Thank you for reading!

The Speech & Smile Team