Diapositiva 1

http://www.greatschools.org/parenting/behavior-discipline/slideshows/4391-brain-first-grade.gs?page=5 17/07/2013Activate their mindsA youth human brain is a chaotic jungle of neurons getting "wired" together into intricate circuitry patterns. Early experiences have an enormous influence on children's absorbent sponge-like brains and also strongly affect the way they mature. By providing everyday activities that arouse your child's curiosity, youre helping to create neural pathways that will increase their learning efficiency and capacity. Expose your preschooler to a variety of stimuli and allow your child hands-on interaction with three-dimensional materials. Cooking, finger-painting, clay construction, musical instruments, and going to festivals, petting zoos, museums, tide pools, concerts, and outdoor natural areas are all sensory-rich activities.

Be gentle Children need to feel safe and confident. Stanford University research indicates that traumatic stress and fear can release toxic levels of the hormone cortisol, which can destroy neurons in the hippocampus, a region that supports factual and episodic memory. You can minimize stress by giving your child positive, loving, sensitive, and encouraging feedback. Keep reprimands and threats to a minimum, avoid unnecessary power struggles, and shouting or spanking in discipline. Also, be patient about bedwetting, be sympathetic about fear of nightmares, the dark, and thunder-and-lighting storms, and allow your child to have a security object like a cozy blanket or a stuffed toy.

Chatter time Preschool is prime time for auditory brain development. Supporting your child's hearing and speaking helps construct strong neural circuitry for absorption of more language acquisition. Ideally, talk, sing, and read to your child in a voice that varies in pitch and rhythm and emphasizes important words. (If we mumble in a flat drone your child will get bored and not focus.) Try to ask open-ended questions that initiate thinking, explain "how things work," use high-level vocabulary, and regularly include your child in conversations that will help expand their vocabulary. Protect your child's hearing by treating ear infections promptly, and encourage her to "use her words" instead of throwing tantrums. Preschool is also an ideal time to introduce a second language since the young, "plastic" brain absorbs language quickly.

Social gracesIf possible, enroll your child in a quality preschool or schedule regular play dates with friends. Encourage your child's fantasy play with friends "pretend" games develop the brain's verbal zones and enhance social skills in sharing, communication, and conflict resolution. Allow your child to have "imaginary friends" for the same reason, but remember, preschoolers have difficulty separating reality from make-believe, so don't call them "liars" if they insist that their stories are "true."Photo credit:Bimmer Chaser 71

Let's focus A three- to five-year-old child might pay attention for five to 10 minutes, at best. Demanding sustained concentration on a task will frustrate both of you, but you can help your child improve his brain's working memory via games and activities that demand attention control. Recommended are checkers, tic-tac-toe, Candy Land, Chutes 'N' Ladders, age-appropriate puzzles, and concentration the card game in which you flip over face-down cards and try to match pairs. Praise your child for hard work, and model self-control in your own behavior.Photo credit: heraldpost

Categorize the worldBy the age of four, many circuits in the brain's cortex are formed for math and logic. To develop this center, encourage your child to compare, collect, and label objects and events in the world that shes curious about. Do counting games, and teach the methods of classification, like big/little, long/short, shapes, colors, weight, height, and temperature.Photo credit: cproppe

Digest this For optimal brain growth, feed your child a balanced, nutritious variety of vegetables, fruit, whole grains, dairy, and meat. Perfect brain food includes egg yolk,fatty meat, and soybeans contain choline, the building block for the neurotransmitter acetylocholine, which is crucial in memory function. Its also crucial to limit their intake of candy, cookies, fruit juice, and sugary, and salty junk food that is only "empty calories" devoid of essential nutrition. A recent Bristol University study indicated that young children fed junk food developed IQs up to five points lower than healthy eaters, because they consumed insufficient vitamins and minerals for optimal brain growth.Learn more tips on great brain food for your child.

Body buildingIdeally, young kids should get at least 30 minutes a day to run and play outside. John Ratey MD, author of Spark, calls exercise "Miracle-Gro for the brain" because it elevates neurotransmitters and stimulates neuron growth. Swings, rocking toys, and spinning equipment are developmentally productive by stimulating different parts of the brain at the same time; building new pathways; and enhancing learning potential, spatial awareness, and rhythm. Full-body sports like soccer, swimming, yoga, gymnastics and dance are also valuable brain-building exercises.

Rare TVAn article published in the journal Pediatrics by University of Washington researchersconcluded, "early television exposure is associated with attentional problems . . . efforts to limit television viewing in early childhood may be warranted." Deleterious results can be hyperactivity and shortened attention spans. Avoid this by limiting TV to one hour per day, and don't enroll in preschools that place kids in front of a screen. Positive programs can be found on National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and many short, easily-absorbed clips on YouTube.Photo credit:Goldenfire

More resourcesYour Child's Growing Mind: Brain Development and Learning From Birth to Adolescence, by Jane M. Healy, Ph.DIntelligence and How to Get It, by Richard E. NisbettHelp Your Preschooler Build a Better Brain: Early Learning Activities for 2-6 Year Old Children, by John BowmanSeven Times Smarter: 50 Activities, Games, and Projects to Develop the Seven Intelligences of Your Child, by Laurel SchmidtPhoto credit: K's GLIMPSES

The kindergartner's brain"Let me do that! I'm all grown up now."Kindergartners can be swollen with self-esteem, thanks to graduating from preschool into "big kid" school, where they mingle with older role models. Indeed, the kindergarten range of four-and-a-half to six years old is often bossy, belligerent, and boastful about newly-acquired motor skills like sprinting and monkey-bar tricks. The kindergarten brain also features many mental upgrades from a preschooler's: superior memory, beefed-up attention span, a tighter grip on reality, improved self-control and social skills, and a firmer grasp of knowledge codes i.e., numbers and the alphabet.Even so, kindergartners are burdened and blessed with brain activity that's wildly alien to adult intelligence. A five-year-old noodle has 100 billion brain cells (neurons) with 77 percent in the furiously-networking cerebral cortex the zone that constructs language, math, memory, attention, and complex problem-solving. The neurons are maniacally sprouting dendrites, skinny octopus arms that slither out to receive data from up to 15,000 other cells, and axons that transmit information to other cells. Links between neurons or synapses build cognitive pathways that create every individual's specialized "brain architecture" that allows them to comprehend, accumulate, and retain knowledge.Harvard's Center for the Developing Child notes, "early experiences in brain architecture make the early years of life [ages 0 to six years] a period of both great opportunity and great vulnerability for brain development." In other words, these are crucial years for building the foundation of "brain architecture" a time when, as a parent and caregiver, you can have a significant impact on your child's development. Kindergarten is also a critical year because you want your child to enjoy the educational process. How can you help your child navigate the new world of "grown up" expectations? Start by following the guidelines to come.Photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Talk, sing, and readTalk, sing, and read books frequently to your kindergartner. Steady exposure to verbiage enables their cerebral cortex to develop strong neural circuitry for swift acquisition of language. Parents also would do well to be active listeners, asking open-ended questions that initiate thinking, such as, 'If you could have any superpower in the world, what would it be?' or, 'What do you like most about going to the beach?' Plus, explain how things work, use high-level vocabulary, encourage writing, and include your kindergartner in adult conversations. Kindergarten is an optimal year for introducing new words and a second language. Children's book author Tomi Ungerer recently opined in the New York Timesthat, "between the ages of three and seven, children can learn three languages a year. If you're not teaching them another language, you can always develop their vocabulary."

Reading help in kindergartenLearning to read by "sounding out" letters in words is difficult for many kindergartners, even if their brain's auditory development is excellent. One reason, notes Jeannine Herron, Ph.D., author of Making Speech Visible, is that memorizing the alphabet is misleading, because letter titles A, B, C, etc. don't sound precisely like the sounds they represent. For example, the letter G has a J sound, H is way off-base with its "AAACH" pronunciation, and all the vowels can be utilized with more than one sound. This difficulty delays thousands of struggling readers. To circumvent this, Herron recommends teaching kindergartners to "pay attention to what their mouth is doing" when they learn phonemes

Be gentle in kindergartenFor their learning ability to flourish, kindergartners need to feel safe and confident. A 2007 Stanford University study indicates that traumatic stress and fear can release toxic levels of the hormone cortisol; this can destroy neurons in the hippocampus, a region that supports factual and episodic memory. To protect your kindergartner's self-assurance, give your child positive, loving, and encouraging feedback. Minimize reprimands, avoid unnecessary power struggles, and don't use shouting or spanking in discipline. Express sympathy if they're afraid of nightmares or the dark, and be patient about bed-wetting: Many children continue enuresis until age seven or longer.

Tiny inventorsFind a great elementary school for your child with a kindergarten teacher who comprehends the learning process at this age. Kindergarten brains thrive on exploring, playing, inventing, experimenting, constructing, and tinkering with three-dimensional materials. Their brains actually grow in response to novelty and challenge because curiosity secretes dopamine, a chemical that stimulates the dendrite expansion that wires the brain. For these reasons, it's worth finding a class where children's physical activity is encouraged and teachers truly understand the developmental needs of the age group. Your child's kindergarten teacher also needs to be encouraging, understanding, and supportive to help him learn best. At this age, the big academic topics they need to master reading and math, most notably should be presented as fun, with minimal and enjoyable homework.

Stimulate the sensesExperiences this year will have a huge impact on your kindergartner's absorbent brain. When not in school, children benefit greatly from activities that pique their curiosity. Expose your child to hands-on interaction with three-dimensional materials and take them on sensory-rich outings to festivals, zoos, museums, concerts, and outdoor natural areas.

Let's focus in kindergartenA kindergartner's attention span is about five to15 minutes long. To bolster your child's concentration level, engage her in activities that require focus, like meditation and board games. Teaching self-control and delayed gratification will also help your child academically: The correlation between self-control and GPA is twice as high as the correlation for IQ and GPA. You can also boost your child's patience by modeling it in your own behavior by speaking and acting calmly. Finally, limit TV watching to an hour per day studies suggest TV over-stimulates young children's neurological systems, resulting in hyperactivity and shortened attention spans.

Body building in kindergartenIdeally, kindergartners should have at least 30 minutes a day to run and play outside. Columbia University research discovered that exercise builds brain cells in the dentate gyrus.According to John Ratey, MD, author of Spark,exercise elevates a chemical he dubs "Miracle-Gro for the brain" because it builds the brains infrastructure. Full-body exercises like soccer, swimming, gymnastics, and dance are recommended. Plus, for optimal brain growth, feed your child a balanced, nutritious variety of vegetables, fruit, whole grains, dairy, and meat, and limit ingestion of candy, cookies, fruit juice, and sugary, salty junk food. Egg yolk, fatty meat, and soybeans contain choline, the building block for the neurotransmitter acetylocholine, which is crucial in memory function. (Learn more about healthy brain foods kids love.)Photo credit: Ida Christine Kyisgaard

Tuning up in kindergartenExpose your children to music, and if they show any aptitude, get them an instrument. Play structured, melodic music for them and sing songs. UC Irvine's Gordon Shawgave 19 children piano or singing lessons for eight months, and found that the kids demonstrated dramatic improvement in spatial reasoning. Shaw, who regards music as "a window into higher brain function," has published numerous studies indicating that children who study music are ahead of their peers in math.Photo credit: Helen Morgan

Inside your first grader's brain"That's not fair!"If your six-year-old's pleas for justice are driving you nuts, take note: Your childs fixation on fairness is developmentally positive. The first-grader's swiftly developing brain is leaping from magical thinking to logical, rational mental processing; shes eager to understand the principles behind rules and regulations.First graders are incongruously attracted to both the penal code (laws, police, ethics, traffic signs, crime, jail) and to competitive winning at all costs! They'll panic if you jaywalk because they fear prison. But they'll also lie, cheat, and argue to win.What's happening neurologically inside the first-grader's conflicted skull? The buzzing three-and-a-half foot child in front of you is experiencing major brain blasts as his cognitive circuits are getting programmed for life! First-graders have trillions of pathways that connect their neurons in the cerebral cortex. This tangle of wiring is getting pruned in a six-year-old at an alarmingly intense rate. The rarest-used pathways are eliminated to streamline each individual's thought process. Here's some help to optimize your first-grader's quickly developing mind:Photo credit: Heidi &Matt

Aim highThe sensory lobes that recognize and analyze challenges are maturing at a rapid rate in the six-year-old's brain. In other words, the first grade brain has stunning plastic capability that should never be underestimated. Your first-grader will do best with a sensitive, yet demanding teacher who insists on quality work. According to professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine Daniel Siegel, teachers expectations of students abilities have a huge effect on student learning. In one study, teachers were mistakenly told that some of their students who had been previously identified as learning disabled were in fact gifted. After the teachers raised expectations, the students performed up to expectations.Photo credit:Neighborhood Centers

Reading help Learning to read by "sounding out" letters in words is difficult for many kindergarteners, even if their brain's auditory development is excellent. One reason, notes Jeannine Herron, Ph.D., author of Making Speech Visible, is that memorizing the alphabet is misleading, because letter titles A, B, C, etc. don't sound precisely like the sounds they represent. For example, the letter "G" has a "J" sound, "H" is way off-base with its "AAACH" pronunciation, and all the vowels can be utilized with more than one sound. This difficulty delays thousands of struggling readers. To circumvent this, Herron recommends teaching kindergarteners to "pay attention to what their mouth is doing" when they learn phonemes.

Talk it upYour loquacious first grader will thrive if you talk and read with her as often as possible, since rapid brain growth in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation happens primarily before the age of seven. An Entropy article authored by Princeton researchers reports that six-year-olds can comprehend 13,000 words because their cerebral cortex, with such strong circuitry, acquires language at the rate of 10 new words per day which means a new word every 90 minutes! Six-year-old brains have developed interconnected "mental language maps" where they can quickly chart and categorize the meaning of words. To help their language skills develop, include them in adult conversations. This is also a prime time to introduce a second, or even third, language.Photo credit: BrettMorrison

Safe spaceFirst graders need to feel relaxed and emotionally secure for their brains to learn best. Research indicates that traumatic stress and fear releases toxic levels of the hormone cortisol, which can destroy neurons in the hippocampus, a region that supports factual and episodic memory. To protect a first-grader's confidence, parents and other important adults should give loving, encouraging feedback, as well as minimize reprimands and threats, and avoid shouting and spanking for discipline. Express sympathy if they're terrorized by nightmares or ashamed of bed-wetting. Many children continue enuresis until age seven or longer.Photo credit: crispyteriyagi

Calm the stormPatience, patience. Dramatic six-year-olds can be exasperating, but imagine what they're experiencing. In Your Childs Growing Mind, by Jane M. Healy, Ph.D., she notes that, "Neuropsychologists talk about the 'five-to-seven shift' because so much change occurs in the brain during these years. One study found that a specific area involved with language and spatial awareness had changed 85 percent between ages six and seven in one girl's brain."Photo credit:ROIHUNTER

Tuning into their mindsA 2009 Journal of Neuroscience articlereports that when 31 six-year-olds received instrumental musical training for 15 months, the result was impressive changes in brain anatomy. For example, the auditory and cortical motor systems actually grew larger. So expose your child to music, and if she demonstrates an interest, by all means, get her an instrument. Play structured melodic music for your child and sing songs.Photo credit: Woodleywonderworks

Focusing researchA first grader's attention span ranges from six to 20 minutes, depending partly on gender. A report published in NeuroImageclaims, "we found robust male/female differences in the shapes of the trajectories with total cerebral volume peaking at age 10.5 in females and 14.5 in males." This difference, says Leonard Sax. M.D., author of Boys Adrift, explains why six-year-old boys cant pay attention as long as six-year-old girls. To bolster a boy's concentration, encourage activities like meditation and board games, and limit TV and video watching. Studies indicate screens over-stimulate still-developing neurology, resulting in abbreviated attention. Why? Some researchers believe TV and video viewing wastefully releases high quantities of the neurotransmitter dopamine, a key regulator for focus.Photo credit: Smile Moon

Of brain and brawnTry scheduling at least 30 minutes a day for your first grader to run and play outside. According to John Ratey MD, author of Spark, exercise elevates a chemical Ratey dubs "Miracle-Gro for the brain" because it builds the brains infrastructure. Aerobic sports programs like soccer, swimming, hockey and martial arts are outstanding brain-boosters. First grader's thrive on physical challenges, because their energetic, integrated sensory systems progress far quicker than adults. Abundant researchreveals that students who exercise intensely perform better academically than those who do not.Photo credit:Khem

Mute emotionsDon't expect six-year-olds to open up easily and "share their feelings." When Harvard neuroscientists using MRI imaged activity in young children's brains, they discovered that the cerebral cortex that does the talking is not yet connected to the amygdala, a subcortical, primitive area where emotion occurs.That's why it makes little sense to ask first-graders to tell you why theyre feeling sad. Quite often, they don't know!Photo credit: J-Zimmerman

A balance of brain foodFeed your child a balanced mixture of vegetables, fruit, whole grains, dairy and meat, and limit their intake of candy, cookies, fruit juice, and sugary, salty junk food. Children need a wide variety of essential nutrients for optimal brain growth. For example, egg yolk, fatty meat, and soybeans contain choline, the building block for the neurotransmitter acetylocholine, which is crucial in memory function.Learn about more healthy brain foods kids love.Photo credit: trdwijaya

More brain resourcesThe Developing Brain: Birth to Age Eight, by Marilee SprengerYour Child's Growing Mind: Brain Development and Learning From Birth to Adolescence, by Jane M. Healy, Ph.D