Higher Order Thinking Skills For Kids

Higher order thinking skills for kids is more important than most people realize. As a parent and educator, I have seen first hand impressive results in children who have been enriched with higher order thinking activities.
The skills of memorizing and recalling facts or information are called the lower-order thinking skills as they do not require wide and deep thinking.
Sadly, much of the teaching and learning in schools today is based on the lower order thinking skills. Thinking skills such as clarifying, making analysis, generating ideas, making decisions, problem solving, and planning which require wider and deeper thinking.
These are called higher order thinking skills.
Bright children who are able to draw on their higher order thinking are able to: Solve problems; Think creatively; Think critically; Make decisions; Generate new ideas; Analyse information; Plan for the future; Sadly, many questions that are asked require a "Yes" or "No" answer from children. Many answers are either "Right" or "Wrong".

How can our children of the future be expected to find cures for illnesses and invent amazing things without opportunities to take risks, explore different avenues and have the freedom to think without restriction? We as parents and educators must aim to unlock independent thinking in children.
We need to find fun and stress-free activities provide opportunities for open-ended response where children are encouraged to look at things differently and 'think outside the square.
' To Promote Higher Order Thinking & Creative Thinking Skills, activities must provide opportunities to encourage: Creating - Generating new ideas, products, or ways of viewing things, designing, constructing, planning, producing and inventing; Evaluating - Justifying a decision or course of action, checking, hypothesising, critiquing, experimenting and judging; Analysing - Breaking information into parts to explore understandings and relationships, comparing, organising, deconstructing, interrogating and finding; Applying - Using information in another familiar situation, implementing, carrying out, using and executing; Understanding - Explaining ideas or concepts, interpreting, summarising, paraphrasing, classifying and explaining; Remembering - Recalling information, recognising, listing, describing, retrieving, naming and finding.

For more guidance and focused activities for kids to develop higher order thinking skills, visit the link below.