movement | Integrated Learning Therapy

Our active brains

Mar 20, 2024 | I'm a Parent, I'm a Teacher, ILT Blog

Another post on the value of movement? Yes. There are so many compelling reasons to keep reminding educators of the need to encourage children to move. At home, they have to have time for energetic play away from screens and sedentary toys like Lego. At school, they need frequent breaks to enable the body to best support the learning brain.

By this time, you should be realising that the brain does not benefit more from sitting at a desk busy with reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic than running, playing and learning while moving. Instead, the evidence increasingly supports the view that working the muscles of the body benefits the brain. In fact physical activities can alter the structure of the brain in very precise ways.

One important brain area that benefits from aerobic exercise is the hippocampus. This is at the core of the brain’s learning and memory systems and research has shown that it grows as people get fitter. In addition to improving memory in general, there are studies to show that exercise accompanying learning can improve memory formation. A German study showed that walking or cycling during (but not before) learning helped memorise vocabulary of a new foreign language. So walking around while revising study material may be more helpful than sitting at a table.

Exercise has been touted for helping focus and the ability to stay on task. We keep pleading for more schools to take cognisance of the value of interspersing lessons with bouts of aerobics-style exercise because there are studies to show how this improves the attention spans of learners. And even more significantly, a study in the USA showed that daily extra-mural sports classes improved the executive functioning in children. This was shown by their becoming more able to ignore distractions, to multitask and to show improvement in working memory, being able to hold and manipulate information in their minds.

An exercise programme doesn’t need a great deal of planning or space. Many homes and schools lack outdoor space but there are beneficial games that can be introduced needing very little. A large group of German teenagers improved their attention span by merely boucing two balls at the same time for 10 playful minutes.

Apart from the mental benefits, we know that movement also has powerful effects on mood and can be used to lift depression. It also seems to be able to boost creativity and divergent thought.

Our brains don’t operate alone; we have to forget the very old and outdated belief that the body is there merely to carry the brain around. There is so much evidence about the value of movement and it should be translating into school policy and home habits.

Content of this post is partly based on the writing of Ben Martynoga. He is a neuroscientist and science writer. He tweets at @mountainogre.

Image supplied by Freepik.

Summer is on our doorstep. How does this affect pre-schoolers?

Oct 25, 2023 | I'm a Parent, I'm a Teacher, ILT Blog

Many articles focus on the importance of outdoor play for children. We know how crucial movement is to their physical and mental development and know that being outdoors takes them away from the screens that tempt them inside. But what happens when the days get hotter – especially in view of the extreme temperatures the world seems to be experiencing these days?

New research reported by Esther Robards-Forbes of the University of Texas found that as the weather gets hotter, preschool-aged children become more sedentary.

The findings, published last week in the JAMA Pediatrics, may seem obvious to anyone who’s seen young children become over-heated on the playground on a hot day. The study, however, went a step further and used monitors worn by the children to study their behaviour.

“Given that we’re seeing an increasing number of hot days,” said Andrew Koepp, lead author of the paper and Ph.D. candidate in human development and family sciences at UT Austin, “it’s important to understand how young children’s activity changes so that we can take steps to make sure they are getting the physical activity they need to be healthy.”

The study followed the activity levels of children ages three to as they played on their school’s partially shaded playground. Ambient air temperatures were between 22 degrees and 35 degrees Centigrade.

When temperatures were at 22 degrees, children engaged in moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) for 27% of their outdoor play time. MVPA is defined as raising the heart rate to the point where one can speak, but would have a hard time singing. When temperatures rose to 35 degrees, MVPA dropped to 21% of outdoor play time. Additionally, sedentary time, where children were sitting or still, rose on hotter days from 62% on play time at 22 degrees to 70% of playtime at 35 degrees.

Indoor play is not a reasonable substitute for outdoor play, said Liz Gershoff, a professor of human development and family sciences, noted child development researcher and an author on the paper.

“Other research by our team has shown that children are much more physically active outside than inside,” Gershoff noted. “This is likely in large part because classrooms have more expectations about behavior indoors than outdoors. There may be some indoor and air-conditioned settings that are conducive to physical activity, such as indoor gyms and play places, but those may not be available in all areas.”

Because young children may be less aware of things such as the need to slow down and drink water, heat can be especially dangerous for them. It’s necessary for adults to monitor children for signs of distress and take steps to keep kids safe.

It is also important that playgrounds have features like shade sails, heat reducing materials, fans, misters and water play areas. Play times may also have to move to earlier in the morning when it’s cooler.

“A lot of policies are focused on stopping climate change, but in many ways, it’s already here,” said Koepp. “We need to start looking at policies, practices and recommendations that recognize that, if we’re going to limit the impacts on the next generation.”

More information: Andrew E. Koepp et al, Ambient Temperature Increases and Preschoolers’ Outdoor Physical Activity, JAMA Pediatrics (2023). DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.0067

Journal information: JAMA Pediatrics

Image supplied by Freepik

Is the brain a muscle?

Oct 18, 2023 | I'm a Parent, I'm a Teacher, ILT Blog

Another post on the value of movement? Yes. There are so many compelling reasons to keep reminding educators of the need to encourage children to move. At home, they have to have time for energetic play away from screens and sedentary toys like Lego. At school, they need frequent breaks to enable the body to best support the learning brain.

By this time, you should be realising that the brain is not a muscle that benefits more from sitting at a desk busy with reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic than running, playing and learning while moving. Instead, the evidence increasingly supports the view that working the muscles of the body benefits the brain. In fact physical activities can alter the structure of the brain in very precise ways.

One important brain area that benefits from aerobic exercise is the hippocampus. This is at the core of the brain’s learning and memory systems and research has shown that it grows as people get fitter. In addition to improving memory in general, there are studies to show that exercise accompanying learning can improve memory formation. A German study showed that walking or cycling during (but not before) learning helped memorise vocabulary of a new foreign language. So walking around while revising study material may be more helpful than sitting at a table.

Exercise has been touted for helping focus and the ability to stay on task. We keep pleading for more schools to take cognisance of the value of interspersing lessons with bouts of aerobics-style exercise because there are studies to show how this improves the attention spans of learners. And even more significantly, a study in the USA showed that daily extra-mural sports classes improved the executive functioning in children. This was shown by their becoming more able to ignore distractions, to multitask and to show improvement in working memory, being able to hold and manipulate information in their minds.

An exercise programme doesn’t need a great deal of planning or space. Many homes and schools lack outdoor space but there are beneficial games that can be introduced needing very little. A large group of German teenagers improved their attention span by merely boucing two balls at the same time for 10 playful minutes.

Apart from the mental benefits, we know that movement also has powerful effects on mood and can be used to lift depression. It also seems to be able to boost creativity and divergent thought.

Our brains don’t operate alone; we have to forget the very old and outdated belief that the body is there merely to carry the brain around. There is so much evidence about the value of movement and it should be translating into school policy and home habits.

Content of this post is partly based on the writing of Ben Martynoga. He is a neuroscientist and science writer. He tweets at @mountainogre.

Image supplied by Freepik

Helping Emily through movement

Aug 2, 2023 | I'm a Parent, I'm a Teacher, ILT Blog

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.

Can movement help learning difficulties?

Jul 26, 2023 | I'm a Parent, I'm a Teacher, ILT Blog

Image supplied by Freepik

(Acknowledgments to Svea Gold and Sally Goddard)

The brain has gazillions (is that a word?) of neurons – that we call ‘wires’ – and these neurons need to communicate with each other so that we can function. This means that there are trigazillion (my new word) connections in the brain. It is rather remarkable that most of us manage to form these neurons and their connections without faults but we need to remember that there are many things that can go wrong.

Thanks to research, we’ve had confirmation that things suspected through observation and experience are facts. We now know that by carefully watching how a child moves and what a child needs to do to meet an expectation from school or his home, we can get an idea of where in the brain the problem lies. Then, by giving the child’s brain a chance to repair itself, we can bring about positive changes.

This isn’t up-to-date news. Way back in 1996, a writer in an edition of Newsweek focusing on Your Child’s Brain wrote “…. There is new evidence that certain kinds of intervention can reach even the older brain and like a microscopic screwdriver rewire broken circuits.” This was about the time that I was researching ways of helping children – giving rise to ILT in the year 2000. You can imagine my excitement!

So today let’s have a look at an example of how we apply neurodevelopmental insights to solve a child’s learning problem.

An important reflex movement

It’s significant that many children with learning difficulties have no Headrighting Reflex (HRR). This reflex shows when the angle of the body in relation to the ground shifts – in other words, the body tilts to either side, backwards or forwards. The reflex automatically adjusts the head to remain in a nearly vertical position. In a less well coordinated child, the head does not remain or immediately return to the vertical position but stays in line with the body. In other words, the child’s head moves in line with his spine.

If the head rights itself, there is very little shift in the background compared to when the head tilts in line with the spine. (Try this yourself by swaying to each side, alternately keeping your head still in a vertical position and allowing it to align with the spine.) Such a child will find himself in a constant state of visual strain because one of the reasons for this reflex is to stablise visual images on the retina of the eye. There is little wonder that children who don’t have this reflex may have reading problems.

Giving a child the HRR

This is where a knowledge of neurodevelopment can help. We need to give children a HRR if they haven’t developed one themselves. How do we do this?

Different parts of our bodies are controlled by different nerves but it is wise to remember that nothing stands alone. No function of the brain operates in isolation. For example, when your vestibular system (in your inner ear) is stressed (perhaps by movement), you get seasick. You feel this in your tummy and it happens because of the intimate interconnectedness of different nerves. The vagus, one of the ten cranial nerves, is responsible for causing your stomach to revolt against the movement registered by an overwhelmed vestibular system.

The HRR is influenced by another cranial nerve that controls the trapezoid muscle. This muscle controls the movements of the head and neck. If a child hasn’t developed the HRR, it is likely that there is a poor connection between the trapezoid muscle and the cranial nerve that controls it. Our job would be to connect this muscle and we use a seemingly simple movement activity to do so.

The original movement came from Carl Delacato, who worked for many years with learning disabled children. He found that having children lie on the floor and moving their arms, legs and head in a way that resembled the movement of a ghecko or lizard, caused significant and positive changes in the brain.

The Flip Flop movement

The benefits of the Flip Flops are many. Information goes into both sides of the brain as the muscles move equally on both sides. At the same time the brain gets sensory information from the weight of the body moving across the surface on which the child is lying. This is very important because during later development the brain is constantly having to coordinate information received from the two brain hemispheres to allow for stereophonic hearing, posture and vision. So with our Flip Flops, we are not only stimulating the cranial nerve to connect to the trapezoid muscle but also influencing vision, hearing and balance. Through this, information is communicated to many other brain areas, especially to the cerebellum, the midbrain and the thalamus. The thalamus is an area of the brain that acts as a gate-keeper – either allowing sensory information to pass through to higher brain (cortical) areas or not. If it fails to allow certain information through, the important messages will not arrive at the proper destination.

So in short, by giving a child a (seemingly) simple activity, we are effecting profound changes in brain function. We can’t control what comes out of the brain but we certainly can control what goes in. This helps the brain receive the information it needs to correct faulty wiring.

Other reflex movements are significant too

Giving the child a head-righting reflex is good but we need to test for later developing movements as well. Once we’ve made connections in the lower brain regions, we have to persevere to encourage connections needed for more sophisticated functions.

When you bring about better neurological organization, you are addressing basic problems in the various areas of the brain. This enables the child to function independently and with improved abilities in many different spheres of life. Such children seem to ‘get it together’ and with this, their self-esteem and confidence soars.