Questions during dinner, you ask?  Who's got time for family dinners? A task more doable when you have younger children.  As our children grow older, homework, sports practice, extra hours at the office, social lives, and many other things battle for our time and attention.  Yet we've heard it before...kids who have regular dinner with their families tend to be more secure, and they generally do better in school.  

1) Feed them well!  I believe it starts with nutrition. A healthy mind depends on a healthy body, and I don't know any parent who doesn't rejoice when they see their children putting healthy food into their mouths. What you are putting on the table will be what they are putting into their mouths. Watch out for empty calories and focus on food that will actually add nutrients to feed their brains. Of course, this applies to all meals and snacks, not just dinner.

2) Tell a story! A remarkable IQ begins with a healthy imagination. Start a story, then go around the table and ask everyone to add a sentence to keep the story going. This will work with all school-aged children, and the older they are the more interesting and involved your stories will become! To work on their memory skills (and yours), try to keep the story going for an entire week.

3) Talk about current events! Talk to little ones about the basic structure of government. Teach them how a bill becomes a law and discuss some of the recent laws in the news. Ask them for their opinions and tell them yours.  You may be surprised at their level of thinking, especially as they get older and more aware of controversial topics!

4) Challenge their critical thinking skills! Bring up problems you see people deal with, or ones you personally have dealt with lately. Ask them for solutions. For example, the family has two cars and one is in the shop for repairs. Three of you need to get to three different places at different times on the same night. How do we solve this?  Your children will be no better if you are always serving them up with solutions when they are capable of coming up with them, too. It will raise their confidence, as well as their intelligence.

5) Play games! We are particularly fond of word games in our house. Choose a topic (for example, diseases), and go through the alphabet naming diseases with each letter. Learning languages is known to be especially intelligence boosting. See who can say hello in the most languages. Make up your own family language, adding a new word each night. Your heart will swell as you see your children laughing and learning at the same time!

Of course we are not merely focused on the goal of raising the test scores of our children, though that is a great benefit. Getting into a good college is important, and test scores will certainly help. Coming together at dinnertime, or a different time that works for your family, and being intentional about stimulating your kids' minds will increase their imagination, memory, and critical thinking skills. If dinner time is too daunting a task for you, I suggest you find a different time during the day to come together as a family. For us, it happens at bedtime. Even though mine are now teenagers, it has become a regular habit none of us are willing to give up. Stimulating your child's brain will help them to feel valued and confident about facing their futures as they learn to think and problem solve. And who knows...it may keep our aging minds sharper a bit longer!