It’s good to be reminded of encouraging and helpful ideas. So this week we’re bringing you a reprise of one of our most popular articles. We hope you enjoy this best-of post.

Young children spend the first five or six years of their lives busily making sense out of life around them. Their brains are on overdrive: observing, categorizing, comparing, discriminating, problem solving, experimenting, testing, assimilating.

For example, let’s say you hand your child a spherical object and tell him that it is a ball.

Over the next few weeks you show him other spheres—white and black ones, small ones, large ones, rubber ones, plastic ones—and they’re all balls. So your child starts to form some brain connections about balls: they are sphere shapes.

Then your child encounters a round Christmas tree ornament. It’s a sphere shape too. Is this a ball? No? Why not? What’s different about it? His brain is hard at work. He’s trying to figure out what might be the difference between those two spheres. He connects the ornament to spheres in his mind, but not to balls, and he tucks that idea away to explore further and clarify more as opportunity arises.

Later he sees a football. Now he has more categorizing, comparing, discriminating, testing, and assimilating to do and new ideas to explore: This thing is called a ball but it’s a different shape. Does this ball roll like the others? How might it be used? Does the color have anything to do with its being a ball?

Or how about this scenario: Mommy gave me hot tea when I was cold. Do I get hot tea every time I’m cold? Is that the only time I get hot tea?

Or this one: Your child sees a person standing on one leg. That looks different. What is different about it? Can I do that? Will it hurt? Should I try now?

A young child has a lot of brain connections to make about things around him.

And even more processing is taking place in conversations. He is learning a new language with all of its nuances and syntax and exceptions to syntax and figures of speech that don’t really mean what they seem to.

This is all happening with everything around him—indoors and outdoors—plus everything within his own body. He’s working on balance and distance discrimination and muscle control and speed judgment and force determination, not to mention experiencing his own emotions and learning how to handle them, along with handling other people’s emotions.

Your preschooler is busy learning all day every day. And if you don’t give him enough time and opportunity to work on those fundamentals, he will be at a disadvantage when it comes to schoolwork. All of those brain connections are essential to success in later life.

What Your Preschooler Really Needs

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