How to Develop Your Child’s Brain: 18 Months

How to Develop Your Child’s Brain: 18 Months

28 Aug 2017 | 3 min Read

Kuhoo Gupta (The K Junction)

Author | 101 Articles

Your bundle of joy is 1.5 years already, indeed a milestone!

 

Hope you have followed this series so far and enjoyed the activities with your children. If not, take a look at the activities for last two months here – 16 months, 17 months.

 

Fine Motor – Following how your child enjoys the kind of activities I mentioned in my previous article (17 months), you can make it little more complex. Here, I got my son these two games that require him to insert ring like objects into the thin rods. You can easily DIY this with a thermacole board or just a wheat dough, fix straws into it and give polo confectionary or something similar to insert into the straws. It helps develop grip, hand-eye coordination, concentration and enhances fine motor skills.

 

 

Field Trips – Even when your child is this young, it is a great idea to visit different places like a museum, aquarium or even local vegetable market or the likes. Children absorb so much into their minds, much more than what we think they can. And it is a great sensory experience for them too!

 

Matching – In my last two articles (16 and 17 months), I have introduced the concept of visual discrimination and how important it is for a child. You can now extend that to shape matching and color matching if your child is ready and seems interested. Here, I have made a DIY hand drawn activity for rainy season where he has to match the shapes inside the umbrellas and the colored popsicle stick to its handle.

 

 

Sorting – If your child is ready for sorting, you can try sorting as per the colors. I reused the existing nesting blocks of three colors and my son had to sort the colored pom poms. We began with sorting just two colors and then graduated to three to increase the complexity.

 

 

Practical Life – It is never too early to give them a taste of real life activities! You can start with a blunt butter knife and assist your child to cut an easy thing like a banana. Slowly your child will get a hang of how to use a knife.

 

 

Please keep in mind that every child is different and what I suggest in a particular month may not be applicable to your child now. Don’t get anxious if  your child is not interested in these activities or has already mastered the skills. It is also possible that maybe s/he is not interested at the moment and enjoys it when offered at a later point in time.

 

Your child will only get ready as he grows up, so from next month (19 months) onwards, I will bring to you weekly activities.

 

Watch out!

 

Also read: How to Develop Your Child’s Brain: 17 Months

 

Explore the entire collection of articles: Early Learning & Brain Development

 

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