8 Activities To Boost Your Baby’s Brain

Ineh Olisah

Babies are born with as much as a billion neurons in their brains. These neurons are what store information and carry out every human physical and mental function action. The neurons are connected by synapses and the more the connections, the better the brain function. These connections however are formed and strengthened when your baby’s brain is at work or engaged in activities as she experiences and interacts with the world around her. 

Now, we all want our babies to be intelligent at least, if not super genius like Tesla and Einstein. It will definitely be a good idea if we knew how to help babies boost their brains  power, wouldn’t it? Here are a few simple tips.

SEE ALSO:Your Baby’s First Week: What to Expect & How to Cope

Speak Parentese?

I was amused to find out that there was a language called Parentese. It’s characterised by pronouncing your words sloooowwlyyy so that baby’s little brain can register all the syllables. Almost every adult/parent instinctively speak like this when communicating with a baby so you probably have this on lock down.

Make Faces

Among all the kinds of intelligence there is, emotional intelligence is one of the most important. Although your child will instinctively know how to smile you should smile often  with the child while talking or breastfeeding her. The child’s brain recognises the smile and tries to duplicate it. Hormones are released into the child’s brain that stimulate it and also forms connections between smiles and pleasant feelings. Of course, making funny faces also does the same thing so go on and let your face do some magic for baby’s brain.

Read and Picture This

Yes, you know those books with large colourful pictures? They will go a long way in helping your baby from those genius brain cells from early in life. Don’t forgot to touch the words as you read and read slowly so that baby connects the sounds and the written  words. Also, it will be helpful to change voices and put emphasis on your intonations to better enrich your baby’s spoken language.

Hold Conversations

While we’re talking about speaking and languages, it’s needful to say that holding conversations with your child will help build her expressive and receptive abilities. That is, the parts of the brain that handles the ability to understand what is being said and to express what she wants to say. Start doing this from as early as when they start to coo and babble. Hopefully, this should help them start talking faster.

SEE ALSO:9 Things You Should Know About Your Newborn

Go Sight Seeing and Sound Hearing.

Go for a drive. Or better still, go for a walk with baby. He’ll be fascinated with all the sights and sounds of the streets or nature, if that’s where you prefer. As he sees amusing stuff and points, call out the names of what he points at and if the have a particular sound, make the sound as well. Say for instance you see a car, you can also point at it and say “car…vrooom”. Be animated as you do these things. The more animated you are, the deeper the connections that are formed in the brain.

Sing A Sing Of Sixpence

And maybe some 50 Cents. That’s if he has decent, moral songs though. Sing lullabies. They are melodious and have rhymes. These will amuse the child and also develop her appreciation of rhyme and rhythm and she will apply them as she continues to hold those conversations with you and any body who cares to listen.

Get Messy

Create time and space for kids to get messy. It could be in a inflatable pool filled with water (of course) or a sand box. It could be on a bed of shredded clothes of different fabrics. The idea is to develop their sensory abilities  in terms of differences in texture of different physical materials. And hey, there’s absolutely nothing wrong in jumping in and enjoying the splashing and crawling around. This way you both get some needed playtime and you can also double as an undercover supervisor.

Run Wild and Free

If you don’t have a grass lawn or garden and you don’t want to go out to a nature/amusement park, clear the living room and create space for your child to run and climb and expend all that excess energy. That means carrying all the fragile and breakable decor away and making sure they are monitored. They need all the running, climbing and crawling to develop their sense of space and direction. These can help them do that in a fun way short of enrolling them at a child gym. Do they have those though?

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Well, the list could go on and on because there are different ways of developing the different parts of the brain that handle different kinds of mental and physical ability. And you know what? They can all be fun and affordable. Well except for the time and effort you’ll spend in cleaning up. There is another brain boosting activity too: get your toddler to help clean up and also develop their sense of order and organizational. See? There’s just a load of things you can do to help your baby grow genius brain muscles. You can let us know your own way of doing this or your experience and the results you got in the comment area. It will be welcome. Looking forward to “reading” from you.