CogniBlocks Kids Programme
CogniBlocks For Kids is a cognitive development and educational programme for children ages 4 to 8 years old that empowers young minds to soar.
Children use plastic building to solve various challenges and tasks by memorising, copying, building, stacking, manipulating and creating various shapes, patterns and objects.
Our exercises have been specifically designed to developed and expand children’s cognitive abilities and skills in numeracy, literacy, fine motor control, perception and social interaction.
Lessons
Lessons are run by an instructor who is there to give guidance and helps the children with their tasks by asking questions that leads them to solve the challenges independently or as a group.
Each lesson runs for 30 minutes and exercises skills such as Perception, Numeracy, Literacy, Social and Fine Motor control.
Lessons increase in difficulty throughout the course to match children’s cognitive development and keep them engaged and challenged.
Each lesson involves tasks that challenge children to remember details about an object such as structure, colour, sequence, pattern, orientation or amount for a period of time and then later recall that detail.
As a result children learn how to memorise details. Children are shown how to spot mistakes or changes.
Every week there is something new in the lesson keeping the children excited as to what they will be doing.
Children are tasked with building objects from 2D models from various perspectives such as top down / isometric or front views.
More advanced tasks require examining physical 3D models and recreating those from memory.
Children are challenged to use their creativity to solve problems such as crossing make shift bridges or rivers, or building different structures that are either tallest or strongest.
Healthy competition is introduced by involving the children in fun games and getting them to work under pressure at times to solve a problem.
Children are often put into groups to do tasks that involve cooperation, teaching them how to communicate their thoughts and plans. They learn how to work together and how to describe things in detail.
Children learn to rely on one another to solve problems and also learn how to share blocks with one another regardless of how many or little blocks are made available.
Children learn perseverance as blocks do not always do that as expected and they are given the opportunity to think for themselves.
Children are encouraged to play with their creations for the last few minutes of a lesson. Being allowed to physically build something, not just think it, and play with it to see how it works, helps children learn and retain the information better as all senses are involved.
CogniBlocks allows the children to develop many skills including presentation: the children often have tasks in which something has to be built and then presented to the class. Children discover in which way they learn best: listening, watching, copying and memorising or a combination of all.
Children often start CogniBlocks with a sense of not knowing how to build what they are thinking. After a few weeks of engaging their imagination and creativity they stop saying they do not know how to and start building whatever they think would work.
Children develop confidence in making adjustments to their models or presenting their creation and explaining what the idea was.
The course consisting of weekly group lessons, of up to 12 children, aligns to preschool / school terms.
The course has 2 levels aimed at 2 different age groups.
Level 1-2
Ages 4 – 6 / Grade RRR – Grade 0 / Preschool children.
This level introduces Mathematical concepts such as addition and subtraction.
Children learn about building plans: looking at 3D objects and interpreting them into numbers on a grid introducing the children to the abstractness within Mathematics.
Graphing concepts are played with and the flashcards challenge building and memory skills.
Children play with block based Sudoku and learn to pay attention to detail by either looking for mistakes or changes.
Level 3-4
Ages 6 – 8 / Grade 1 – 2
This level contains more advanced material and introduces more complex mathematical concepts such as following a chain of commands, word sums, symmetry and puzzle challenges.
Geometric shapes are played with and explored and the children practice counting in tens. Logical thinking exercises are practised as a group and memory skills are challenged even more.
There is more focus on visualisation and conversion between 2D models to tangible objects and vice versa. The children are also introduced to the world map and get to explore exciting discoveries like famous structures and flags from some countries around the world.