Allow time for thinking.
This is by far my top piece of advice to parents working on encouraging children to master thinking skills. There is just no value in rushing our children through thinking activities. Plan and protect a generous amount of time when you engage with your children in activities like those found in the resources we recommend at Thinking To Learn.com.
Thinking, by it's very nature, is a time-intensive activity. Thinking activities require multiple tries, discussing strategies, considering and obtaining new information, and adjusting when attempts fail. These types of activities are characteristically different from rote-based learning activities like repeating multiplication times tables or memorizing spelling words. They require multiple steps, consideration, prioritizing from available tools and approaches, and subsequent testing and evaluating the approach. To short-change your child's time when working on thoughtful activities is to frustrate the child and to encourage guessing.
My own children have struggled most with critical thinking activities when I have did not established an adequate amount of time for the activities, trying to rush the solution - looking for the answer to come quickly and easily, rather than appreciating and valuing the process the child will need to either practice and apply strategies learned, or to talk through and apply new strategies.
When adequate time is not allotted, we end up encouraging our children to jump to conclusions, to guess, to hop around grasping at quick answers - all characteristics and habits of mind we don't want to encourage.
Practically, this may mean strictly limiting the number of activities that you and your child will work at during a 15- 30 minute session. The more relaxed you are as the parent, the more your child will be. And we all know we think a lot better when we are not stressed to deliver quick solutions.
Providing adequate time creates room for the questions we want to encourage children to ask of us and of themselves - How will I approach this problem? Have I ever seen a problem similar to this one? Do I have all the information I'll need to solve it? Is there something I need to learn before I can solve this?
Equally important, is to permit enough time to talk through the approach and then to evaluate the process once the activity has been attempted. The post-mortem analysis is the time when much of the learning for future problems will occur. Don't be tempted to short-circuit this analysis time by trying to get onto the next problem so that X-number of activities or pages can be completed during the time period.
Summary: Make adequate time to work thinking activities. Emphasize the importance of taking the time to think through and strategize before putting pencil to paper. Allot an adequate amount of time to analyzing the approach used in the current attempt, with the goal of refining and improving an understanding of how to approach this style of problem in the future.
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