Spellings for our children - right brain thinking!

By Dianne Craft
MA, CNHP


God has a wonderful sense of humor, I believe. He wants us to grow and stretch, and one of the ways He does this is to give us children who are very different from each other. Just as it is very likely that a right brain person will have a left brain spouse, so it is that if our first born is left brain dominant, the next child likely will be right brain dominant. This brain dominance affects both personality characteristics, and learning styles.

How do you determine if you are teaching a right brain child? Children tend to display these characteristics at an early age. All children are creative, but your right brain child will seem to be even more imaginative. The right brain learns things in wholes rather than parts, so that child will get math concepts well, but may struggle with the details like the math facts, or checking work. In thinking styles, the right-brainer often goes by “gut feel” whereas the left-brainer prefers multiple facts before coming to a conclusion. In test taking, the left-brainer prefers the black-and-white choices presented in multiple-choice questions, while the right-brainer may prefer essay questions, where the whole picture can be given.

Eighty percent of the struggling learners I see are right brain dominant. Does that mean that being right brain dominant is a weakness? Not at all! As you know, Einstein was a flaming right-brainer. Then why the discrepancy? It is that most curriculum is designed to teach in a more left brain style. Workbooks, worksheets, rote memorization (math facts), timed tests, lectures, learning facts from a test, learning vocabulary by looking up the meanings of the words in a dictionary and writing it out, are all left brain activities.

If you have a child at home who is balking at doing the schoolwork that fits the description above, you probably are working with a right brain dominant child. To help this child become successful doesn’t require an entire change in curriculum but rather a change in your teaching strategies for this child. It isn’t as hard as it sounds. In fact, it’s easy, fun, and inexpensive.
Spelling

Let’s look at the teaching of spelling words. We all want our children to be good spellers, and are very frustrated when our methods aren’t working. The most common complaint I receive is that the child learns the words for the test, but continues to misspell them in other writing tasks. This is one of the easiest problems to solve, and I have regularly seen two years spelling growth in one year, using a simple method.

Have you ever seen a picture in the newspaper of a spelling bee winner? If you have, you may have seen the student with his eyes in an upward position. In other words, it looks like he is looking at the ceiling for the word he is spelling. This makes sense in light of the recent brain research that tells us that we can cause our right brain (the hemisphere that houses our photographic memory) to become more responsive by looking up with our eyes. In other words, we use our eyes to help us think, as well as to see. When the student is looking up, he is “seeing” the word in his head. Because he is seeing the printed word, he can spell it backwards, as easily as forwards.

You can train your child at home to use this very efficient strategy. Not only will it be painless, but you will find the right brain is responsible for visual memory and long-term memory, so your child will remember how to spell his words long past the week of the spelling test.

This efficient right brain spelling strategy is simple.

1. Give your child a preliminary test from a short list of commonly used words.

2. Among the words that were spelled incorrectly, take the letters that were wrong, or left out, and color or mark them up.

For example: If your child spelled “Saturday” as “Saterday” put the “Sat-r-day” in black marker on a card, since he knew those letters. Put the “u” in blue, with wavy lines in it to represent water, and a stick figure diving into the water. You can add a story, like, “They all Sat around on Saturday and one of them got bored, so the brothers decided to go swimming.”

3. Hold the card straight up in front of your child so his eyes are looking up. (Make sure his chin isn’t up, but only his eyes). Have him glance at it, then bring it down while his eyes remain looking up, where the card had been. Flash this card in the air, five or six times until your child can “see” it in the air, and easily spell it forwards and backwards. If your child can't easily “see” it in the air, show it more times, or put more “velcro” on it by putting in more color, or a more detailed picture.

4. Review the card each day of the week for a few minutes.

5. Your child’s photographic memory will become stronger and stronger as you use this method.

Remember that your child’s visual memory is his greatest strength. As you help him develop that, using spelling words, math facts, or anything, you will see learning and memorizing become much easier. The success a child feels when he can “see it” is priceless.

Dianne Craft is president of Child Diagnostics, Inc., in Littleton, Colorado, and the author of Brain Integration Therapy for Children Manual, and “The Biology of Behavior” audio tape set.

Study stress

Siya is currently in the first standard and it is just a few days that the school has started. In the parents teachers meeting held last week, I could see anxiety, nervousness, tension and complete stress on all parents face. This is just so hard to believe right! A child in first standard and mom is all worried already about the progress of the child. So here is my interpretation of the whole thing.

Although most people think that 'studying' and 'learning' are synonyms, they are not. There is a very important distinction: 'studying' is the devoted time and activity which may or may not lead to learning, while 'learning' is the actual process of acquiring knowledge or insight.

Learning is good; studying is a necessary evil at best. While both can cause stress, study stress is a greater culprit. What's wrong with studying? The problem is 'study' is confused with 'memorization', which is energy intensive and generally not very efficient compared to an actual hands-on learning experience. Repetition is the mother of learning if we are talking about a physical activity or a complex mental simulation - but not memorization.

The key to reducing study stress is to get to know your own learning processes a bit better, and use your time and mental energy more efficiently. Can you study with a hands on approach? Do that. Make a game out of it. Understand, don't memorize.

Be clear about your goal and use the motivation it gives you. Study stress can easily be converted into a healthy tension from challenge - if you are clear about your goals.

Tomorrow - Right brain thinking inculcated in kids....

Really simple ways of getting work done

While I was in office, my boss calls up on my extension at 12:00 and I tell him "Hey, I am going home, my work for the day is done!".

Imagine getting a full day’s work done by noon. Sounds impossible, right? But it really shouldn’t be. If you eliminated all the time you spend procrastinating, distracted or stalled, getting a full day of work done by noon could be realized. I have done it, so can you!

But being this productive everyday, day by day is not so simple. Lets try and make this simple. I recall going back to my old school day - THE SPORT DAY! I would always ask my mom "Why do I start running far faster when I see the finish line?". To that, mom would reply - "You can see the milestone far closer to you and achievable". Along the race, I would be all tired and almost ready to faint but when I see the finish line, I wonder where I would get the energy from to cross and win! Hope you are understanding the analogy I am giving here!

Procrastination isn’t mostly about knowing when to start. It’s about knowing when to stop. Most of us, start with a infinitely long TO DO list. This is the underlying stress that comes from feeling that there is too much work ahead, and so any effort won’t make much of a dent in the short term. You can short-circuit this stress by having a clearly defined end-point for your work. With a finish line in sight, it is much easier to summon up the energy to sprint ahead and cross it.

What is measured is improved upon. If I measure my work in hours rather than tasks accomplished, I will improve upon nothing. This was the main reason why the concept of flexi timings was introduced. Why have timings at all in the organization as long as you accomplish your tasks! Isn't that itself a big motivation factor already! What better if I can start my day saying "I will complete 10 tasks today within 2 hrs and then can wind up early and see Siya skating in the evening."

One lecture that I had heard sometime back, completely changed the way I worked. It was on "Channelizing your energy correctly". Many people learn about Time Management to make them more productive. The basic concept is that your energy, not time, is what matters when getting work done. With a lot of focus and enthusiasm you can often get done triple the work in the same period of time. Whereas, working a 16-hour day instead of an 8-hour one is just a recipe for burnout. So manage your work in bursts - extremely productive and high energy followed by energy recover. This is cyclical.

Now how does it work - on every Sunday, prepare a weekly to-do list, every night before sleeping, prepare a daily to-do list, and now simply follow the daily to-do list. Pretend your other work doesn’t exist. When you’ve finished the daily list, you’re done for the day and you’re not allowed to add more work. The fact that you can see the finish line daily, you will be able to put it far more energy and focus. The fact that you will now measure your day by tasks accomplished rather than hours, you will be far more motivated and procrastinate far lesser!

Try it and let me know how it goes!