by Sarah Major, M.Ed
Honestly… what do we really mean when we say a resource or person is right-brained?
The term “right-brained” has been a buzz word recently, and I have written extensively myself about how to create right-brained methods and teaching materials. If I want to be super-technical, saying that any resource or approach is right-brained is completely misleading! If that were the case, there would be no symbols in any of the teaching resources, no numbers, no letters, and no words! All we would have would be color, images, patterns, rhythm, and so forth.
To say that my focus is on helping right-brained learners succeed is completely accurate, however. Another important thing to note here is that no one uses just one side of their brain; that would be impossible. However, many people rely primarily on skills that are directed from one or the other brain hemisphere, so that is what I mean when I say “right-brained.” My focus and recommended resources are for right-brained learners; they are designed to marry the functioning of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. To simplify, I have taken to just calling them right-brained.
What does it mean to integrate left and right hemispheres in the learning process? Let’s paint a scenario. Say you have a child who is obviously bright and creative, quick-witted, and sociable. Let’s also say that wonderful child is really having a hard time in kindergarten and cannot seem to remember letters and their sounds, or if she was successful with learning the sounds (possibly because they were embedded into a chant or song), she is now seemingly unable to progress much further than that. She has trouble sounding out words, or if she does laboriously sound them out, she cannot remember having seen the word 10 minutes later. Say we conclude the bright, witty, creative child is actually right-brained dominant because she comes out with the most off the wall ideas, can draw amazing pictures, loves to make things with her hands, or is talented with anything that involves movement.
If we have concluded the child is dominant right-brained, would it help her if we laboriously translated everything strictly into pictures? Kind of a picture sign language of sorts? Or would that serve to further weaken the functioning of her left hemisphere, the hemisphere of her brain that deals with symbols, procedure, rules, steps and all those intangibles that school is made of? My goal when I work with right-brained learners is to strengthen left hemisphere functionality by using right-brained elements to convey left-brained concepts.
How does this happen? What I am doing is actually enlisting the aid of the right-brained talents and putting them to use to help left-brained concepts come to life. BOTH hemispheres are working at the same time. To get really technical, I am strengthening communication and collaboration of the hemispheres in learning. This can be done just like we can strengthen any muscle in our body through repeated use. This is the wonderful news!
The corpus callosum is like a bridge, a communication network between the various regions in the brain. The more we develop the networks between the hemispheres, the more and more information will travel between the hemispheres. This is so great! There is hearing, touch, speech, spatial visualization, language and mathematics, and calculation. When we set a task before our young children, the best outcomes result when they are drawing from multiple regions in the brain. If, for example, we take one of those pesky sight words (left hemisphere) and embed it in a picture (right hemisphere), and add a body motion and sentence, we are causing multiple regions in the brain to fire at one time. Is it not amazing how rich the learning experience becomes?
What if the communication via the corpus callosum is weak? This is a reality for many children! If you have a child you have attempted to teach to read (for example) and he is just not getting it, it is not because he doesn’t have the capacity to learn. It is likely that communication in the brain can be strengthened, and there is help! Following are some ways to help integrate the brain hemispheres.
1. Get plenty of the right physical activity. Notice that the left hemisphere controls functions on the right side of the body and vice versa. Any activity that comes naturally to children who have plenty of free time to play will help strengthen the corpus callosum: running, crawling, going hand over hand on the monkey bars, jumping in a way that your left leg goes out as your right arm goes up in the air, using your right arm to reach around in front of your body to grab something, marching as you swing your arms opposite of how your feet are going, dribbling a soccer ball to the goal in the back yard, and so many more!
2. Use drawing and writing on a daily basis. Before beginning class for the day, provide your child(ren) with enticing coloring materials and give them time to draw a picture of whatever they want. When they have finished, have them write a caption and then talk about the drawing with you and their siblings. In this way they will stimulate both hemispheres in the brain.
3. Use visualization regularly. Sometimes right-brainers have a hard time expressing themselves, and most particularly when they are under pressure. (Examples include answering a question in front of the whole class, when they know they are in trouble, when they have to describe something using only words, when they are tired, etc.) It helps a lot to provide time for the child to visualize as a picture in his head what he is thinking of, what he has read, or what he has seen, and then give him time to retrieve the words he needs to change from an image into words. When it comes to linking reading to comprehension, visualization is a powerful tool. The child needs to be taught this skill. Have him read a short section – start small! Next, have him close his eyes and see what the words said as a picture in his head. Then, have him express in words what he saw in his head as a picture. This may not go well at the beginning, but if you make a daily practice of doing this, the visualization “muscle” will strengthen and visualization will become an automatic process.
4. Praise and encourage your child in all his attempts. Make a pact with yourself to never criticize the child for any attempts he makes in the process of learning. Do not compare the right-brained child with any other child. Focus on the right-brain learner’s incredible ability to see what others don’t, to envision brand new things that have not been invented yet, to see the whole picture all at one time, and to learn a hard concept in one snap of his mental camera.
5. Keep an open mind. Don’t make your right-brainers have to learn like everyone else does just because we as adults feel “this way that I teach is the right way.” Gulp and swallow, and then just let your RB children learn whole words instead of sounding out words. Let him embellish plain words so that they LOOK like what they mean.
Sarah Major, CEO of Child1st Publications, grew up on the mission field with her four siblings, all of whom her mother homeschooled. As an adult, Sarah has homeschooled a small group of children in collaboration with their parents, and has taught from preschool age to adult. Sarah has been the Title 1 director and program developer for grades K-7, an ESOL teacher, and a classroom teacher. As an undergraduate student, Sarah attended Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill. and then received her M.Ed. from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI. In 2006 Sarah resigned from fulltime teaching in order to devote more time to Child1st, publisher of the best-selling SnapWords™ stylized sight word cards. In her spare time Sarah enjoys gardening, cooking, pottery, quilting, and spending time with her family.
Child1st Publications, LLC
www.child-1st.com
800-881-0912
3907 Fraser St NE
Rockford, MI 49341
Honestly… what do we really mean when we say a resource or person is right-brained?
The term “right-brained” has been a buzz word recently, and I have written extensively myself about how to create right-brained methods and teaching materials. If I want to be super-technical, saying that any resource or approach is right-brained is completely misleading! If that were the case, there would be no symbols in any of the teaching resources, no numbers, no letters, and no words! All we would have would be color, images, patterns, rhythm, and so forth.
To say that my focus is on helping right-brained learners succeed is completely accurate, however. Another important thing to note here is that no one uses just one side of their brain; that would be impossible. However, many people rely primarily on skills that are directed from one or the other brain hemisphere, so that is what I mean when I say “right-brained.” My focus and recommended resources are for right-brained learners; they are designed to marry the functioning of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. To simplify, I have taken to just calling them right-brained.
What does it mean to integrate left and right hemispheres in the learning process? Let’s paint a scenario. Say you have a child who is obviously bright and creative, quick-witted, and sociable. Let’s also say that wonderful child is really having a hard time in kindergarten and cannot seem to remember letters and their sounds, or if she was successful with learning the sounds (possibly because they were embedded into a chant or song), she is now seemingly unable to progress much further than that. She has trouble sounding out words, or if she does laboriously sound them out, she cannot remember having seen the word 10 minutes later. Say we conclude the bright, witty, creative child is actually right-brained dominant because she comes out with the most off the wall ideas, can draw amazing pictures, loves to make things with her hands, or is talented with anything that involves movement.
If we have concluded the child is dominant right-brained, would it help her if we laboriously translated everything strictly into pictures? Kind of a picture sign language of sorts? Or would that serve to further weaken the functioning of her left hemisphere, the hemisphere of her brain that deals with symbols, procedure, rules, steps and all those intangibles that school is made of? My goal when I work with right-brained learners is to strengthen left hemisphere functionality by using right-brained elements to convey left-brained concepts.
How does this happen? What I am doing is actually enlisting the aid of the right-brained talents and putting them to use to help left-brained concepts come to life. BOTH hemispheres are working at the same time. To get really technical, I am strengthening communication and collaboration of the hemispheres in learning. This can be done just like we can strengthen any muscle in our body through repeated use. This is the wonderful news!
The corpus callosum is like a bridge, a communication network between the various regions in the brain. The more we develop the networks between the hemispheres, the more and more information will travel between the hemispheres. This is so great! There is hearing, touch, speech, spatial visualization, language and mathematics, and calculation. When we set a task before our young children, the best outcomes result when they are drawing from multiple regions in the brain. If, for example, we take one of those pesky sight words (left hemisphere) and embed it in a picture (right hemisphere), and add a body motion and sentence, we are causing multiple regions in the brain to fire at one time. Is it not amazing how rich the learning experience becomes?
What if the communication via the corpus callosum is weak? This is a reality for many children! If you have a child you have attempted to teach to read (for example) and he is just not getting it, it is not because he doesn’t have the capacity to learn. It is likely that communication in the brain can be strengthened, and there is help! Following are some ways to help integrate the brain hemispheres.
1. Get plenty of the right physical activity. Notice that the left hemisphere controls functions on the right side of the body and vice versa. Any activity that comes naturally to children who have plenty of free time to play will help strengthen the corpus callosum: running, crawling, going hand over hand on the monkey bars, jumping in a way that your left leg goes out as your right arm goes up in the air, using your right arm to reach around in front of your body to grab something, marching as you swing your arms opposite of how your feet are going, dribbling a soccer ball to the goal in the back yard, and so many more!
2. Use drawing and writing on a daily basis. Before beginning class for the day, provide your child(ren) with enticing coloring materials and give them time to draw a picture of whatever they want. When they have finished, have them write a caption and then talk about the drawing with you and their siblings. In this way they will stimulate both hemispheres in the brain.
3. Use visualization regularly. Sometimes right-brainers have a hard time expressing themselves, and most particularly when they are under pressure. (Examples include answering a question in front of the whole class, when they know they are in trouble, when they have to describe something using only words, when they are tired, etc.) It helps a lot to provide time for the child to visualize as a picture in his head what he is thinking of, what he has read, or what he has seen, and then give him time to retrieve the words he needs to change from an image into words. When it comes to linking reading to comprehension, visualization is a powerful tool. The child needs to be taught this skill. Have him read a short section – start small! Next, have him close his eyes and see what the words said as a picture in his head. Then, have him express in words what he saw in his head as a picture. This may not go well at the beginning, but if you make a daily practice of doing this, the visualization “muscle” will strengthen and visualization will become an automatic process.
4. Praise and encourage your child in all his attempts. Make a pact with yourself to never criticize the child for any attempts he makes in the process of learning. Do not compare the right-brained child with any other child. Focus on the right-brain learner’s incredible ability to see what others don’t, to envision brand new things that have not been invented yet, to see the whole picture all at one time, and to learn a hard concept in one snap of his mental camera.
5. Keep an open mind. Don’t make your right-brainers have to learn like everyone else does just because we as adults feel “this way that I teach is the right way.” Gulp and swallow, and then just let your RB children learn whole words instead of sounding out words. Let him embellish plain words so that they LOOK like what they mean.
Sarah Major, CEO of Child1st Publications, grew up on the mission field with her four siblings, all of whom her mother homeschooled. As an adult, Sarah has homeschooled a small group of children in collaboration with their parents, and has taught from preschool age to adult. Sarah has been the Title 1 director and program developer for grades K-7, an ESOL teacher, and a classroom teacher. As an undergraduate student, Sarah attended Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill. and then received her M.Ed. from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI. In 2006 Sarah resigned from fulltime teaching in order to devote more time to Child1st, publisher of the best-selling SnapWords™ stylized sight word cards. In her spare time Sarah enjoys gardening, cooking, pottery, quilting, and spending time with her family.
Child1st Publications, LLC
www.child-1st.com
800-881-0912
3907 Fraser St NE
Rockford, MI 49341
