Critical thinking skills are essential to succeed in everyday life, and there are ways to enhance these abilities for children of all ages.
But what is critical thinking for kids? It means being open to new ideas, arguments, and information. Children with strong critical thinking skills are rational and look for alternative ways to solve problems.
We've collected together the best critical thinking games and critical thinking exercises for kids to make them become critical thinkers!
The most effective way to improve your children’s thinking skills is to engage them with educational games. Here are critical thinking games for kids to support their school success
MentalUP offers 150+ critical thinking games besides attention, concentration, logic, language, visual intelligence, and memory games! 🚀✨
The best part of the multi-awarded app is all these gamified exercises are developed by pedagogues, academicians, and game designers. 🎓🙌
That’s why kids enjoy playing these games a lot; meanwhile, they boost their cognitive skills. 🤩
As parents, you can track your kids’ development with different report tools. These analyses are helpful to you in determining your kids’ strengths and the skills that need to be improved according to their peers! 📊🎯
Now, let’s take a look at some fun activities that can help you encourage younger children to improve their critical skills! These exercises can help them to think critically whether they are at home, at school, or in online classes. Critical thinking in classroom can make them more successful even in their exams, such as the Kangaroo Math Competition.
Children are full of questions, aren't they? So, to encourage their thinking process, you can ask them to try answering their questions or want them to answer would you rather questions for kids. And in the process, you can help them arrive at the answer using logical thinking instead of providing them with a direct answer.
It is possible to improve critical thinking skills even for preschoolers; one of the key elements of high-order thinking is making rational choices and justifying kids' own decisions.
Let's help your preschooler analyse the objects to make a logical decision themselves using critical thinking worksheets for preschoolers.
Go To WorksheetsCritical skills include the reasoning ability to solve real-life problems. And, of course, one of the great ways to support children’s reasoning and classification skills is sorting games that also function as strategy games for kids.
This activity will help children see the differences among various groups and enhance their understanding of the objects.
To play, you can simply ask your children to sort the same kind of objects using different features like colors, shapes, or sizes. Or if you would like to have an online solution here it is: Educational Games for 4 Year Olds
To trigger brain activity, you can always benefit from brain teasers. Solving any kind of brain teasers together will allow your children to learn from you and challenge their problem-solving skills at the same time.
Also, brain teasers are one of the greatest and fun critical thinking games for adults!
Riddles are also an excellent way to help your children become critical thinkers, not to mention how fun they actually are. Asking riddles as team building activities high school are great examples of critical thinking in the classroom!
So, let your children promote their reasoning, problem-solving, and many other skills with a critical thinking activity as simple as riddles!
Since critical skills are absolutely necessary for our daily lives, then why not apply them to some educational activities?
You can take real-world problems like recycling or water scarcity as an open ended questions game and ask your children to think of solutions.
These kinds of pretend competition games for kids will not only boost their problem-solving skills as they focus on creative problems but also help them learn about their environment and develop their good sense.
These fun critical thinking questions and answers are perfect for students in the early grades of school to sharpen their critical thinking, counting and math skills. It is also a very good alternative for kindergarten math games.
Bip bip! Can you tell which scooter will reach the gas station?
🛵
The answer is B!
If you follow the road path, you will see that only B can reach the gas station.
Want to solve more puzzles? Let’s try MentalUP Brain Teaser for Kids
Can you guess who is left-handed and why? 🧐
It’s irregular to serve drinks with left hand for a right-handed person. So, the answer is 5.
You’re good at hard riddles! Let’s continue with MentalUP to see your detailed performance reports.
Which shadow corresponds to the image on the left? 🐓
The correct answer is D.
For more visual brain teasers for kids, download MentalUP and test your visual intelligence skills. You can see your detailed working reports and even compare your results with your peers!
Which way is the bus going? 🚌
Here is a tip for you: This is a bus in the U.K
The bus is moving left.
Because we cannot see the door of the bus in this picture!
Couldn’t find the answer? You can always do brain exercises and improve your visual attention easily with MentalUP!
What colour was the bear?
The bear was white!
The only place you can hike 3 miles south, then east for 3 miles, then north for 3 miles and end up back at your starting point is the North Pole.
There are only polar bears in the North Pole, which are white.
Can’t find the answers? Do brain exercises and improve your problem-solving skill with MentalUP Brain Teasers App!
What am I? 😋
Tip: You’re using this magic word every day!
The most effective way of improving a child’s thinking skills is to support them with educational games. If you are looking for the right games to develop critical skills, you can jump right into MentalUP games specifically designed for your children. Also, don’t forget that MentalUP provides kids with lots of different options such as Math Kangaroo problems, math riddles, and puzzles to empower their critical thinking abilities.
Whether you are a parent or a teacher, you can do activities with your children to help them become critical thinkers. Some of these activities include encouraging their thinking process, playing sorting games, solving brain teasers and riddles, and creating pretend games from real-world problems.
Critical thinking skills are a combination of various abilities, including analysis, evaluation, explanation, problem-solving, and decision-making. There are more elements to be included, but most people accept that these are the 5 most important critical thinking skills.
They start developing around the age of 2 since a two-year-old can communicate, recognize objects around them, and comprehend the differences between them.
Critical abilities are related to one’s age and education. But it can be improved with practice at all ages. For example, the list we’ve created “Best Apps for 11 Year Olds” offers a huge help for that.
It is a part of most educational programs, such as solving math word problems requires critical thinking skills. However, critical thinking in school must be especially encouraged by teachers to help children develop and upgrade these skills. It is possible to improve it by using suitable back to school activities.
Playing critical thinking games for kids like MentalUP, doing puzzles, and solving riddles are the most important thinking activities.
It would be wrong to choose only one game to develop any skills. Instead of looking for the best game, playing beneficial critical thinking games for kids and adults would be more helpful. MentalUP offers 150+ critical thinking games, so the brain keeps being active with different kinds of games all the time.
Sudoku is suitable as a critical thinking game that both kids and adults enjoy to play. It stimulates other types of cognitive skills like attention and concentration too, so playing Sudoku is always a good choice.
MentalUP Educational Games are designed by academicians, game designers, and scientists to support the mental development process of your children. Because they are in the category of best safe kids games, you can be at ease! 🌈 You can benefit from MentalUP, which is among the best funny apps for kids to boost their skills. 💪