Test Your Brain Power

Humans communicate through language, the set of rules that people share in order to communicate.  Speech, the written word, and gestures are all methods of using language in order to communicate.  Language does not develop on its own in children, it has to be taught.  While the ability to communicate is present at birth, there are stages that children go through in order to develop language.

At birth an infant is able to communicate on a very rudimentary level.  Either everything is fine and the infant is quiet, or something is wrong and the infant cries.  As time goes by, the cries become more refined and parents can usually tell if the infant’s cry means that the baby is hungry, tired, or needs a diaper change.  Laughter and cooing develop next.  By 6 months of age, most babies can babble with intonation, mimicking the speech they hear around them.  The more a baby is spoken to, the more intonation the baby will use in his/her own babblings.

Babies understand language before they can use it themselves.  Around 6 months of age, a baby will recognize his/her name.  By 12 months, most babies are able to follow simple commands like “show me your nose” or “give me the bear.”  The ability to anticipate, which is part of the development of understanding language,  develops between 6 and 12 months of age also.  If repetitive games like peek-a-boo or “This Little Piggy” are played frequently, the baby will learn what to expect when the game is started and may even find ways of requesting the game to be played.  This development of language reception is repeated when the child learns to read and write.  Children are able to recognize words like their names, and simple common items before they are able to write them.

Babies learn by copying the sounds they are hearing around them.  An important part of language development is hearing the sounds they make repeated back to them.  If your baby babbles “ba ba ba” to you, repeat it back.  This demonstrates the give and take of language to the baby.  While copying a baby’s babbling is important, it is equally important to speak regularly to babies.  A baby’s language will progress much slower if all the baby ever hears is cooing and babbling, it gives the baby nothing to copy.

Many children say their first word at around 12 months and by 18 months have a vocabulary of up to 20 words.  A baby’s first words are ones that they hear frequently and will help meet their wants and needs.  By 24 months, most children have a vocabulary of as many as 200 words and are beginning to combine words to form more complex thoughts.  Instead of just saying “juice” when they want a drink, they will say “want juice” or “give juice” to express the thought more precisely.  At 24 months of age is when many children begin to use pronouns correctly, particularly I and me.  Of course, it helps for children to hear language used properly in order to be able to use it correctly themselves.

As children get older, the more sophisticated language they hear, the more sophisticated their language will become.  Reading also plays a large part in language development in school age children.  Reading a wide variety of books exposes children to a wide range of uses of language and may introduce new words they might not have learned otherwise.  Starting to read to children when they are babies is the best way to engender a love of reading and demonstrate its importance.

There are many things parents can do to help their children develop language.

Birth to 2 Years

• ~Teach your baby to imitate clapping hands, throwing kisses, and playing games like pat-a-cake, peek-a-boo, and the itsy-bitsy-spider.
• ~Explain what you are doing as you complete everyday tasks like bathing, feeding, and dressing your baby.
• ~Identify colors and common items.
• ~Acknowledge and encourage attempts to communicate.
• ~When your baby uses a single word, expand on it, if your baby says “milk,” say “would you like some milk?”

2 Years to 4 Years

• ~Show understanding of what your child is saying by repeating and expanding on what your child has said.
• ~Ask questions that offer a choice. “Do you want juice or milk?” “Do you like dogs or cats?”
• ~Expand your child’s existing vocabulary by identifying body parts or common items, and identifying what you do with them.
• ~Use photographs of familiar people and places, and have your child help retell what was happening when the picture was taken.

4 Years to 6 Years

• ~Whenever possible give your full attention when your child starts a conversation.
• ~Acknowledge, encourage, and praise correct grammar and proper use of language.
• ~Ask open ended questions that require a response of more than one or two words.
• ~Give your child two- and three-step directions: “Get the toy and put it on the shelf.”
• ~When reading or watching TV, have your child make predictions about what will happen next.
• ~Use everyday activities, like shopping, to have your child use comparative words like heavier, lighter, bigger, smaller.

It is important to remember that when it comes to language development, each child learns and develops at their own pace.  What is more important than reaching milestones by certain ages, is whether the progress is made at a steady pace.  If you have any concerns, discuss them with your pediatrician.

Below is a matchstick shovel next to a pile of dirt.  Move two matchsticks to “pick up” the dirt with the shovel.

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Stumped? Here’s a hint:

One of the two matchsticks that needs to be moved is highlighted.

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The solution:

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For those of you who can’t get enough optical illusions, here is a site that is full of them: www.illusion-optical.com.

This site not only has a large gallery of optical illusions, it also has explanations of why we see what we see in each one.

Here is a sample of the type of illusions that can be found on the site and the explanations that accompany them:

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Explanation

This fun optical illusion is a simple perspective trick. Our mind tries to make a 3D object out of a 2D one. In the process, assumptions are made. The waterfall looks like it is pouring into the bottom pool but it actually stops in mid air. Since the water in the bottom pool has ripples where the waterfall stops, it looks like the waterfall is pouring into it. The ripples around the feet of the sunbathers reinforce this illusion.

And then there’s that palm tree growing out of the side of the pool…

Below is a quote about education by William Butler Yeats.  Arrange the tiles in the boxes to unscramble the quote.

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Click on the puzzle for a printable copy.

Highlight below for the solution.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Five neighbors Carrie, Greg, Mike, Penny, and Tina, are heading back to school.  They are each in different grades, have different color backpacks, and different lunch boxes.  From the clues below can you determine each child’s grade, backpack color, and lunch box design?

You can use this 3×5 grid to help you.

1. The five children are Carrie, the 1st grader, the child with the yellow backpack, the child with a lunch box with cars, and Mike.
2. Greg, who is in 2nd grade, does not have the green backpack or the lunch box with circles on it.
3. Penny, who has the blue backpack, is not in 4th grade and does not have a lunch box with a popular cartoon character on it.
4. Of Carrie and Tina, one has the orange backpack and the other has hearts on her lunch box.
5. Greg, who does not have a yellow backpack, has a lunch box with either circles or cars on it.
6. Mike is not in 5th grade and does not have a red backpack.
7. The child in 3rd grade has a green backpack but does not have a lunch box with horses on it.
8. Carrie is a grade higher than Tina.

View the solution here.

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The answer is 60 cents.  112 is a house number.  It costs 20 cents for the 1 and 40 cents for the 12, a total of 60 cents.

Here is another lateral thinking puzzle, the solution is given in the fallen phrase puzzle below.

There are six eggs in the basket. Six people each take one of the eggs. How can it be that one egg is left in the basket?

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Click on the fallen phrase puzzle for a printable copy.  Highlight below for the solution.

The last person took the basket with the last egg still inside

This week’s brain teaser is an example of lateral thinking.  Lateral mean to the side or a sideways action.  Lateral thinking is taking a new approach to how you are thinking about something.  If solving a problem, like the light bulb brain teaser, you may need to approach it from a different angle.

The phrase was coined by Edward DeBono in 1967 and has become a part of the English lexicon.  Lateral thinking is a form of creative thinking in which information is stored and used in a variety of ways in order to appraoch a problem from as many directions as possible.

Here is an example of a lateral thinking puzzle:

There is a raft in the ocean with several shipwreck survivors.  They spot land but have no way to steer the raft to it.  The only two survivors that are strong enough to make the swim are Paul and Steve.  Neither wants to make the swim because there are several sharks in the water and there is no guarantee of surviving the swim.  Paul puts two coins in a hat and says that if Steve draws the 2009 coin, he can stay on the raft and Paul will make the swim.  If Steve draws the 1988 coin, he will have to make the swim.  Steve noticed that both coins had 1988 on them, but since Paul is a big guy with a temper, he doesn’t want to say anything about him cheating.  How can Steve draw a coin and make Paul swim without calling attention to the fact that Paul cheated?

At first it seems impossible for there to be anyway for Steve to draw a coin and not end up going for a swim in shark-infested waters.  Once he draws the coin and shows it, everyone will see that it is a 1988 coin, which means he has to make the swim.  Engage some lateral thinking, however, and we can reason that if the other survivors don’t see Steve’s coin, and only see the coin Paul is left with in the hat, Paul will have to make the swim.  The logic here is that if Paul has a 1988 coin, then Steve must have drawn the 2009 coin, or Paul can admit to cheating.

So here is the solution to the coin problem:

Steve reaches in the hat and draws a coin.  As he is going to show it to everyone, he drops it over the side of the raft and into the ocean.  He says that they should look at the coin that is left in the hat, which would be Paul’s coin, and if it is 2009 then Paul stays and if it is 1988, then Paul swims.  Since both coins were 1988, the coin left in the hat is a 1988 and so Paul will have to swim.

There are many shows on TV in which the lead characters are known for their lateral thinking.  MacGyver was the show that really started the “something from nothing” creativity in a lead character.  The hero, MacGyver, was able to get out of sticky situations by using lateral thinking and finding different ways to use common items.  He also had about a million uses for duct tape.  Current shows that have heros that use lateral thinking are Royal Pains, Law and Order: CI, and Burn Notice.  In all of these, the characters approach the problems that they face from different angles until they find a solution.

At the bottom of the stairs you have three switches, one of which turns on the light in a room at the top of the stairs.  You are alone and cannot see the light in the room. Making one trip up the stairs, how do you figure out which switch turns on the light?

Stumped? Here’s a hint:

You will have flipped two of the switches before going up to check the light.

Solution:

Flip the first switch and leave it on for a minute then turn it off.   Flip on the second switch and go up to the room.  If the light is off but warm, it it the first switch.  If the light is on, it is the the second switch.  If the light is off and cool, it is the third switch.

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The answer: 11

To get each number in the pattern, add 1 more than you did to get the previous number. 1+1=2, 2+2=4, 4+3=7, 7+4=11.