Brain Boosters: Thinking in New and Powerful Ways
Scattered throughout the curriculum, you’ll find Brain Booster activities—playful, open-ended exercises designed to strengthen your child’s creative and logical thinking. These activities may look like simple games or drawing prompts at first glance, but they are doing powerful work in your child’s mind.
Creative thinking activities help children learn to approach problems with imagination, flexibility, and confidence. Whether your child is finishing a drawing in an unexpected way or brainstorming all the things that can roll, they are practicing how to generate ideas, follow curiosity, and take intellectual risks. These are the same habits of mind that lead to inventive writing, resilient problem-solving, and resourcefulness.
Logical thinking activities build the ability to recognize patterns, sort and classify information, make comparisons, and draw conclusions. These early reasoning skills are the building blocks of mathematics, science, and critical reading. When a child learns to recognize that something doesn’t belong, or finds a way to organize a group of objects, they are beginning to think systematically, learning that there is structure and sense in the world around them.
Together, these two ways of thinking—creative and logical—give children the tools they need to make meaning, solve problems, and explore the unknown. They also support attention span, working memory, and executive function—key skills that help children follow directions, complete tasks, and transition smoothly between activities.
Most importantly, these small but mighty activities remind us that learning can be fun, flexible, and full of delight. They invite children to explore what they can do with their minds. They teach children how to think, not what to think.