In “The Power of the Question,” a blog we published about the relationship between questions and critical thinking, questions are celebrated. They can be impactful learning tools that exercise your child’s problem-solving muscles. As students stack Q&A reps, they’ll soon become good critical thinkers.

There’s no better way to illustrate the usefulness of this critical-thinking practice than with an open-ended question directed at your child that you may have been tempted to answer yourself.

Here’s an example: At the beginning of a new year, the internet offers lots of content with suggested New Year’s resolutions for kids. The parents are the target audience, and the idea is for the adults to feed New Year’s goals to their kids and, together, create a productive list.

So instead, we asked you — our Abeka families — to ask your children what they’d like to accomplish in the new year and share the answers you collected. What we all knew before anyone asked the question was how unpredictable (and often unproductive) a young child’s answer to a question like this can be. But that’s the point!

Sometimes the question isn’t about the answer, it’s about the exercise. It’s about putting an open-ended question in front of your child and allowing that question to provoke thought and reason.

Put another way, questions teach children to think for themselves, and follow-up questions and prompts can teach them to problem-solve, connect ideas, and anticipate potential holes in their reasoning.

So what do Abeka kids plan to accomplish in the new year?

We learned that your children are ambitious, some are quite serious and determined, while others are — shall we say — creative. We also found an inexplicable number of aspiring bakers in the mix.

4th Grader

“My 4th grader said he wants to buy a farm and be a science baker. (He loves science, baking, and country life and wants to combine the three). He said he has to buy it and get the bakery up and running now so he has time to practice before he is an adult, because the Science Bakery Farm will impress his future wife. Lol”

5th Grader

This 5th grader lists four goals in a variety of areas, with one bonus resolution for the new year. The bonus focuses on what she’s not going to do.

1. Ride bike/skateboard
2. Worship God
3. Eat healthier
4. Be more obedient
Bonus: This year, she no longer wants to say vegetables are yucky.

Kindergartener

“My kindergartener wants to ride an elephant.”

8-Year-Old Student

“My 8-year-old hopes to expand his math skills. He loves all things numbers.”

1st Grader

“Quit school and open a bakery.”

The Relationship Between Questions and Critical Thinking

By definition, critical thinking is a method of thinking in a structured or systematic way. Children who become accustomed to thinking critically will, in turn, excel at solving problems independently.

Keep in mind that open-ended questions, like our question about goals for the new year, lend themselves to follow-up questions. Once your child has offered his or her goals for the new year, you might ask questions to learn more about the goals:

What’s the first step to make the goal a reality?
What’s the item you’d like to bake in your bakery first?
Can you create a reminder or routine to ride your bike and skateboard more?

Each question prompts deeper thinking. You can observe your child’s progressions from the idea itself to ways he or she might implement the idea. From there, follow-up questions can prompt anticipation for inevitable obstacles that can stand in the way of an idea or goal and how to mitigate them.

Remember, the practice in systematic thinking is useful and enriching for young students regardless of the actual outcomes of the idea or solution at the heart of the questions. In other words, it’s OK if your first grader doesn’t end up opening a bakery in the new year.

As children advance through each grade level, critical-thinking exercises can grow more complex. Valuable Q&As can be paired with more academic topics, where the problems solved provide useful and relevant outcomes. Perhaps, for instance, you’re working through a lesson in science with your child. Ask an initial question and then continue with a series of questions and prompts similar to these examples:

“That’s a good start. Tell me a bit more.”
“Your answer makes sense, but now can you tell me what would be a contrasting viewpoint?”
“Can you add more detail or an example so I get a clearer picture of what you’re explaining?”

Admittedly, these exercises take time. Yet, if you’re strategic about the questions you’re asking, you can move through a passage or lesson with useful, relevant questions that do not distract from a lesson plan or slow progress. Progress is made through the teacher’s prompting and the student’s answers to those prompts.

Depending on the grade level of your child, you can simplify the questions and prompts or make them more layered using deep-level questions that examine a topic, event, or ideology from various levels and at the intersection of multiple problem/solution scenarios.

If you’d like to take a deeper dive into teaching critical thinking skills, read more about how to balance the soft skills of critical thinking with the hard skills of disciplinary content. You can also read how to use deep-level questions to go beyond recall, leading into new knowledge and wisdom.