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Tell kids the only rule is to cross the mid-line of the body with hands, arms, and/or legs. Sitting around watching TV, however, isn’t one of them!
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Lots of everyday activities activate the whole brain by crossing the mid-line.
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Draw them, do them in the air, walk around in a figure 8 pattern.Ĭrossing the mid-line so your kids are using both the right and left sides of their brain isn’t all that complicated. Write and draw with your non-dominant hand helps.
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(So you weren’t dancing in the 50s and 60s? Ask somebody to show you how to do the twist or get a dance video off the internet.) Twist with the kids while you listen to some old Chubby Checker songs.ģ. Every time you move your right arm to your left side or your left arm to your right side, you’re crossing the mid-line and improving learning, thinking, and problem solving. Just move across the center mid-line of your body. In fact, doing just about anything well, including sports, involves using the right and left hemispheres of the front part of the brain. So does learning math and even doing art. Learning to read and write requires using both sides of the brain. Susan’s math aptitude means she is probably left-brain dominant, and Caleb, the artist, has a right-brain dominance. One feature of brain-based learning involves using both the right side and the left side of the brain.Īlthough nobody is just left brain or just right brain, most of us have a dominance. Not just academics but even playing golf or shooting hoops.īrain Gym®, and programs such as those of Eric Jensen, use brain-based learning to help raise test scores, lower stress, even manage ADHD. Researchers have recently discovered that whole-brain learning or brain-based learning is an efficient and effective learning strategy that helps kids (parents and teachers, too) learn anything easily without struggling. So how will these kids succeed in high school and college? And what if they want to go on to medical school, law school, maybe become engineers? How can we help them? Probably somebody thinks they have ADHD.Īnd teachers report more and more right-brain dominant kids in their classrooms. They’re labeled with a learning disability. Whoa there! You’ve just lost all those right-brain kids. Although we’re getting better at teaching to individual differences in Elementary school, left-brain teaching remains the norm in school. Nothing wrong with being right-brain dominant, except that school is generally a left-brain dominant institution, especially as kids progress on to high school and then college. That’s great but wouldn’t it be better if Caleb could improve in math and Susan could develop some artistic skills? They can and it’s easy. Susan’s a math whiz and Caleb’s an artist extraordinaire. They think about things and ask lots of questions. They take things apart to figure out how they work. This helps the left and right sides of the brain to work together. It allows messages to travel back and forth between the right and the left sides. The Corpus Callosum is like a brain bridge.
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In your brain this is where a dense band of nerve fibers are located called the Corpus Callosum. If you separate your hands, the area just above the finger nails, where the fingers bend – rub them together. When you move the left side of your body you are using your right brain and when you move the right side of your body you are using your left brain. You can see that the brain is divided into 2 sides – the left and the right. It is important that they work together as a team. We have the brain divided into 4 layers top to bottom and each layer has different jobs to do. The little fingers make the back of the brain. You can make a hand model of the brain by making two fists and putting them together.
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