How can we help balance brain development? | Integrated Learning Therapy

All movements and thinking activities that children engage in help to develop the network of brain cells that are so crucial to learning and coping in life. We can create new connections in our brains throughout our lives but during childhood this is crucial for their state of learning readiness and ability to meet academic demands.

The brain is composed of a left and right side – called right and left hemispheres. It may be that we develop a preference for using either side to function but rather than encourage a decided dominance of a particular hemisphere, it is far better to balance the brain. We need the specialised areas of both hemispheres to function optimally – especially in school. With this in mind, we should try hard to provide opportunities that will promote development of both brains in our children.

What kind of activities does your child gravitate towards? TV, computers, video games and texting will wire the brain in a certain way. Art, music, sport, messy play will result in other areas being wired. What is needed is a variety of activities to help the brain’s left and right sides develop equally and be able to communicate efficiently.

The left hemisphere predominates when we are using our right hands and right side of our bodies, speaking, reasoning, or working out a maths or science problem. You will be helping the development of this brain when you get your child involved with:

You can play with numbers, for example having the child learn to count by jumping up and down a flight of steps; call out a number and ask the child to tell you what number comes before or after it; introduce shapes and have them cut out different paper shapes; teach quantity in the kitchen.
As soon as a child is speaking his home language well, introduce a second language. Teaching songs, rhymes and simple phrases is a good beginning.
Install a love of reading. Children simply must have stories read to them.
Once children are older and can read, play a dictionary game: give them the first three letters of a word and have them find words with those letters.
Play with science concepts. For example, ask children how water turns into ice and back again; what makes wood burn? What is wind? Where does our water come from? Explore the environment: have children draw everything they can find in the garden, including insects and discuss their discoveries with them.
Introduce them to music: if at all possible, let them learn to play an instrument. Studies have shown that music appears to accelerate language development, speech and reading skills.
If learning an instrument isn’t possible, at least play music in the home with chances to move to the rhythm, beat out the rhythm on homemade drums and learn the words of songs. Be sure to include a variety of music – including classical.

The right side of the brain is specialised for control over left-hand and left side of the body, imagination, intuition, understanding the ‘big picture’ and more. Activities that encourage right brain development include:

Telling stories and hearing stories read or told out loud.Understanding content through tone of voice and speech inflection is an important part of comprehension.
Dealing with feelings: talking about the child’s own feelings and how others feel; watch a film together and talk about how events affected the child and you. Ask for suggestions how the story or ending could be changed and how that would affect feelings.
Encourage children to engage in fantasy play. Playing make believe is a very important part of childhood.
Study the faces of other people and try to guess their feelings. This can be done with ‘emoticons’ too, but looking at people when you are out and about can be fun and enlightening too.
Use music to discuss feelings. How do different pieces of music affect feelings?
Use art to express feelings: blank pieces of paper with paint or crayons stimulates imagination and the release of emotions. Don’t overdo the colouring-books.

This list provides some examples of the many activities that can be used to help whole-brain development. Spend some time on the internet to lengthen the list, and then enjoy the time spent with your child. Your brain will benefit too!

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.