Helping Emily through movement | Integrated Learning Therapy

Emily loved school and took part enthusiastically in all activities. However, in spite of two years of practicing alphabet letters and sounds, doing word work, being read to and enjoying looking at books, she wasn’t yet reading. She sometimes struggled to name letters and make the sounds they represent. What was going on?

Her teacher noticed that she had difficulty sitting still at circle time. She sometimes preferred lying on the floor. On the playground, she seemed uncoordinated, often tripping and even falling. Her parents laughingly called her ‘our clumsy child’ and were initially unconcerned. Because of her reading difficulties they agreed to have her assessed by an Integrated Learning Therapy practitioner.

Many young children are not ready to learn by the age believed to be adequate to start school. This is because they may be neurologically immature. Children can show when their neurological system is slower to develop in various ways. They may be unable to keep still for periods of times; they can’t follow directions; they struggle with fine motor tasks and are seen to be awkward or clumsy. Sometimes children like this need more time before being ready for formal schooling.

Other children may benefit from remediation through movement. These are children who are already in primary school and are struggling with learning and/or behaviour.

The connection between integrating early reflexes and learning isn’t at all recent news. Piaget is a well-known contributor to child development and way back in 1952 he already described how movement and reflex integration is a foundation for neural development. Higher brain functions, such as learning to read and write, depend on the successful earlier development of lower brain functions. This can be compared to a house, where the integrity of walls and roof will depend on a strongly laid foundation. Without the full development of the lower brain levels, the higher brain areas will function inefficiently.

Children who are neurologically immature can still learn but it takes much more effort.

Once identifying those immature areas, the ILT practitioner was able to design a movement programme to give Emily’s brain a second chance to fully develop. The result was a noticeable improvement in coordination and a rapidly growing ability to recognise and work with written words. She became able to learn to read – because her brain became learning ready.

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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.