@bernie12 I’m a big proponent of encouraging higher level thinking from toddlerhood on - or at least pre-school. There’s no reason we really need to dumb things down as much as we do for kids - esp since most youngsters naturally think outside the box. Keep encouraging that. We should almost never be teaching step by step pure imitation and only use memorization for basic language skills (including mathese and sciencese languages).
But that’s a whole different thread and teachers everywhere have to work with what they have coming in. Unfortunately, too many teachers never really have learned thinking outside the box themselves, so… Still part of a different thread.