You are always crossing the midline with the arm and using both sides of the brain. Then lift the right leg and touch the (right) knee with the left hand, and so on. The most common way is to lift the left leg and touch the (left) knee with the right hand. That’s because crawling involves left leg and right arm simultaneously, then right leg and left arm.Ĭross crawl is an exercise which has many variations, but the whole point is to be using the left and right sides of the body at the same time. When a child – or anyone, for that matter – crawls, they are using both sides of the brain together. So the message from one side of the brain must cross the corpus callosum to control the other side of the body. The two hemispheres of the brain are joined in the middle by a thick bundle of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum. It is a generally recognised scientific fact (so there is some science involved!) that one side of the brain controls the other side of the body. Or even not at all, but my other observations lead me to suppose that the brain gym itself was also useful. Apart from anything else, those 5 minutes would provide a good transitional time between play time and work time, so the positive effects may not have been entirely due to the brain gym. The teacher said that the students worked and concentrated better after these sessions, compared with before the regimen began. The school played music through the speakers, so every classroom spent 5 minutes doing brain gym exercises to music. at the start of the day and after recess and lunchtime, I can’t remember which it was. It may even have been after every break i.e. One of the teachers with whom I worked had worked at a school which had a brain gym session at the start of the day. I will comment about three aspects of brain gym, just to give you a bit of an idea about it. Apart from all the well-known effects of proper hydration in the body, dehydration leads to mental fatigue and an inability to concentrate, affecting all areas of learning. The first “exercise” in this section is simply to drink enough water. Some of these exercises have their origins in acupressure systems. These help to re-establish nerve pathways between the body and the brain, so everything is working together.
Some of the lengthening activities are the stretching exercises that athletes use in their warm-ups. You can imagine the number of situations in which this reflex would be set off in a child who is finding learning difficult in school. As a result, we contract our muscles in a reflex which dates from babyhood.
This can occur in any new situation until we feel comfortable enough to proceed. When we find a task challenging, we tend to withdraw or hold back. Some of these movements are adapted from activities used in behavioural optometry. You need to be able to cross the midline visually in order to read and write to hear with both ears and to reach across the body to write. These focus on the skills necessary for easy two-sided movement across the midline of the body. A BRIEF GENERAL OUTLINE.īrain gym exercises are divided into three categories: This does not include things like taking drugs or anything else which is known to be harmful to self or others. So I thought it worth a mention in a post, and readers can take or leave it as they choose (as with every article.) I also have the belief that you don’t really know whether something will work unless you give it a proper go. However, brain gym can’t possibly do any harm, and I have seen some results of brain gym in action. Well, there appears to be no hard scientific evidence to support brain gym having positive effects on learning, and thus it is considered a pseudoscience. And blocking these communication pathways means we don’t function as well. It seems that we sometimes “switch off” communication pathways in the brain – not intentionally. However, there are some things we do or which happen to us which have the opposite effect.
And this, of course, is a Very Good Thing, because it leads to increased abilities in many areas of life. It all looks as if everything we do stimulates the brain in some way and leads to increasing neural pathways. The articles learning, Part 2 and neuroplasticity talk about the effects of stimulation – movement, sensory, emotional etc – on the brain.
“Kinesiology” is from the Greek root kinesis, which means “motion” and is the study of the movement of the human body.Ī previous post on movement and learning discusses the role of movement in learning, unsurprisingly. The word “education” comes from the Latin educare, which means “to draw out”. An alternative term is “educational kinesiology”.
#Brain gym movement series
WHAT IS BRAIN GYM?īrain gym is a series of movements which claim to enhance whole-brain learning.
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