Yet, the big question that teachers are often asked is, “Can we make our kids smarter?” To some extent, the answer is “Yes!”. However, there are certain approaches you have to take, and you have to take them sooner than later.

The sooner a woman realizes she is pregnant and working on a new life, the sooner she can begin taking vitamins. Brain development begins very early on in the womb. A child’s brain and heart are two organs that begin forming within weeks of conception.

Taking great pains to not only protect those developing organs and aid them through vitamins and minerals to make them strong will help your child’s brain develop into the most healthy brain possible. A healthy brain can then absorb a lot of information and recall it with little trouble, thereby making your child smarter already.

From birth to five, the human brain is constantly growing, expanding, and soaking up knowledge like a giant sponge. This is the prime time to feed your child as much valuable information as you can. It would be ideal if parents could both spend the first five years of a child’s life teaching and raising the child without having to leave the child to go to work, but that isn’t the real world. That is why we have highly qualified daycare and preschool teachers to do what we as parents would ordinarily do if we didn’t have to work.

Studies show that children who are read to or children that spend time reading daily have advanced vocabularies, reading comprehension levels that are high, and a higher ability to decipher and decode. They recognize patterns faster and can solve and resolve problems better than peers who do not read or have not been read to as little kids. The simple act of reading a single bedtime story at night, whether it’s a Bible story or a fairy tale, makes your children smarter.

The human brain is an amazing instrument. When it receives enough water and proper vitamins and nutrients, it grows, thrives, and becomes a living computer. When literally starved of what it needs, it shrinks and confusion, and poor thinking skills are the result. When your child gets plenty of fish, bananas, and other vitamin-rich foods with adequate amounts of water daily, he/she is able to learn better. It is also necessary to give your child breakfast every morning because a body that is hungry and without food is a distraction for the brain.

There is a reason the human body needs to sleep at night. The brain needs to process everything it has taken in during the day and store it as information. Your body needs to heal and replenish cells, which requires extensive amounts of energy and creates a drain on your energy sources. If your body sleeps, it can do all of these things and help you wake up refreshed and ready to learn again.

The same holds true for children and that is why they need to get ten to twelve hours of sleep every night when they are babies, toddlers, and preschoolers. They will be more focused and more able to absorb every bit of information that is taught to them during the day when their little bodies have slept well at night. If you want to make your child smarter, make sure he/she sleeps well.

Kids are naturally curious, and that helps them learn. When your child has a question, take the time to listen to the question, and then take about five to fifteen minutes to answer it in full. This is the “teachable moment” when they are open and receptive to what you have to say and they will hang on every word to get their questions answered and their curiosity temporarily satiated. The more you do this, the more your children will want to learn. The more they learn, the smarter they will become.