Teaching Cognitive Flexibility Using Common Objects

Being able to adapt to changes is an important life skill, but this can be very difficult for some children. Children who have difficulty with the executive function skill of cognitive shift, or cognitive flexibility, may have difficulty with transitions, dealing with changes, seeing perspectives of others, and problem solving. 

We can work on cognitive flexibility with this strategy:

Find Different Uses for Common Objects

 Gather some common objects. Say what it is supposed to be used for, then see if children can find at least one or two other uses for the same object.

 Tell them, “When we are flexible we can see other ways to do things. This helps us solve problems. Let’s practice by finding other ways to use some everyday objects.”

 Here are some ideas for you:

But not all children can do this. For extremely literal children this may be asking too much. If this is really hard for your client here are a couple of other options:

1) Start with clay and see what they make with that. Do they just play with it or do they always make the same thing? If needed, adapt the activity to include some modeling and support. For example, you make one kind of food with the clay then see if they can make another kind of food with it. 

2) Do a search around the room to see if you can find tools you can use to paint (besides a paintbrush of course!). Sky's the limit on this one because you can put almost anything in paint and transfer it to paper. You may not be able to actually try everything you find, but maybe there will be a few that won't be too messy or destructive. You can also set them up for success by having a variety of items spread around the room that are acceptable to you to use for painting.