How to use geometric figures to cultivate young children’s thinking

Children’s thinking ability mainly refers to understanding, judgment, memory, problem-solving ability and creative thinking ability. Here we will use Eastern Star’s thinking curriculum to briefly explain how to cultivate children’s understanding.

Comprehension is the most basic of the five abilities. In the early childhood years, many educational activities aim at cultivating understanding, such as understanding certain categories (such as triangles), relationships (such as orientation relationships) ), rules (such as symmetry), etc.

In view of the thinking characteristics of preschool children, when developing understanding, everyone follows the "operate first, then summarize" approach. For example, in the game "Gem Forest" in the thinking course, it mainly focuses on learning "symmetry" "The arrangement rules of "are not directly explained by the lecturer or parents, but first let the children use materials to fill in the gaps according to the rules, and then summarize the arrangement rules of the patterns. Therefore, induction and summary is an important strategy for developing understanding. When teaching young children In the process of teaching, this situation often occurs: During the activity, the children always operate well, but the operation ends suddenly, which always makes people feel that something is missing. The children's perception of things is often at the perceptual level. How to raise this perceptual level of understanding to a rational level so that children can develop more general concepts? Induction and summary are essential, and effective induction and summary should grasp the following two points.

Understanding and refining of cognitive points. Since it is an activity of understanding, teachers or parents must fully grasp the goals to be recognized, such as understanding squares, what key points should be put forward when summarizing, and what characteristics of squares. , these contents should be sorted out and refined before teachers or parents explain them to young children. Although the training of young children is different from that in primary school, and there is no need to strictly explain the definitions of concepts and theorems, you cannot rely entirely on feelings. It is necessary to give children a scientific understanding. Therefore, before starting teaching, teachers or parents should look through textbooks and related materials to summarize and refine some key points. This is a very necessary process and translated into popular language. Cognitive points are often abstract concepts and rules that need to be converted into popular expressions that they can understand. For example, there are some activities at the beginning of the game "Graphic Dolls" in the Oriental Star Thinking Course. The understanding of the positional relationship of figures involves concepts such as "intersection" and "tangency", which can be explained using some language that young children can understand, such as "holding hands", "shoulder to shoulder", etc.

Most of the activities involving understanding in thinking courses have some transfer activities after the theme activities. For example, after learning about squares, children are asked to look for squares in life. The design of these links is not optional. It is essential or even far from enough. Through certain specific game activities, children gain understanding of certain general concepts, relationships or rules, and how this understanding can be extended to daily life and other related activities. In addition to fully paying attention to the content of transfer activities in the game, teachers or parents must also consciously and flexibly design some activities that can make children gain a deeper and more extensive understanding. Children carry out transfer activities to guide them to use acquired concepts and rules to solve new problems. The design of transfer activities can be carried out from two aspects: 1. Expand the operation materials and continue the ability goals. p>

For example, after completing the activities of filling in the arrangement of figures according to rules in "Pattern Paradise", the teacher can also design some activities to fill in the arrangement of numbers and symbols, so as to deepen the children's understanding of "symmetry", "left to right", etc. Understanding of arrangement patterns. Through this transfer, children can have a deeper understanding of the target and promote children to develop more stable and lasting understanding abilities.

2. Explore material functions and expand capability goals.

For example, after the "Pattern Paradise" activity, teachers or parents can also design some activities to understand other arrangement patterns, such as "repeating arrangements clockwise", "repeating arrangements from top to bottom", etc., through This kind of transfer expands children's understanding of patterns and enables them to better "draw inferences from one instance" and "draw by analogy."