Research on the brain and learning is providing exciting insights for teachers, in many ways providing new understandings, in other ways giving authoritative confirmation for classroom practices. Below are intentionally provocative statements, each with a brief description of how this implication can be drawn from the research. The children who can learn from flashcards will learn better if the card is round. The brain has evolved into a finely tuned thinking organ, but an evolutionary pitfall lurks! When humans are under stress, their brains automatically "downshift" to a lower functioning level. This design allows fingers to pull away from a hot pan before the thought "I need a potholder" can even be formulated, but it just as easily sacrifices thinking and learning to such "survival" responses. Under stress, humans drop from the thinking level, to the emotional level, and eventually to the "fight or flight" survival level. Shapes can be ranked developmentally, based on the age at which each shape can be easily recognized and copied. The circle is first shape learned, at about developmental age three. Those children who can benefit from flash cars will be most successful when they are working at a slightly challenging level where they can safely extend their skills. This means they will feel a small amount of stress. To keep them from "downshifting" their thinking, flashcards should show the least stressful, most recognizable of all shapes: the circle. Circular cards generally allow children to focus more strongly on the content of the flashcard, because the round shape is least distracting. Pennsylvania teachers who have tried this report that their students did actually recall the content of round flashcards better than the traditional flashcards. See: Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain. Renate & Geoffrey Caine, Addison Wesley, New York, 1991. Also, books be Barbara Meister Vitale Movement is the only thing that unites all brain levels and integrates the right and left hemispheres of young learners. The locomotion centers of the brain are paired, facing one another along the top of the right and left hemispheres, so that the center controlling the left leg parallels the center controlling the right leg, and so forth. For this reason, movement ties in both hemispheres, allowing young children almost their only opportunity to apply both sides of the brain to an effort and attempt to pass information between the right and left hemispheres. For this reason many young children (and older kinesthetic learners) must move to learn. They are able to pay attention and learn only if they are free to wiggle around; sitting still is a strain. Communication between hemispheres begins when a child is about five years old, becomes more effective around age seven (when a child can deal with the abstract), and is fully communicating about age 9-10 for girls and puberty for boys. Until these maturation points, most children are better off employing movement whenever possible to cement learning. See: The Brain and Learning: Directions in Early Childhood Education. Marlin Languis, Tobie Sanders & Steven Tipps, NAEYC, Washington, 1980. If children think a tall, thin container holds more than a short wide container, there is no way for them to believe that "A" and "a" are the same letter. Research has shown that from about the age of 15, human brains have seven memory spaces, plus or minus two spaces. The brain has to grow into these 7 + 2 memory spaces. Every couple years another memory space is added, beginning with one space by age three, then two spaces about age five, three spaces around age seven, and so on, each with two more spaces under optimal conditions, and two less under stress. Children younger than five years old are not yet conserving, that is, they think an equal volume of water poured into tall and short containers must be "bigger" in the tall container. That is because very young brains can, at most, use one memory space and deal with one attribute at a time (focusing on tall vs. short, without thinking of the narrow vs. wide dimension). It is impossible for the brain of a very young child to accept that both "A" and "a" are the same letter because they will evaluate the letters based on any one attribute and conclude that the letters look different, therefore they are different. Similarly, the big blue letter "B" on the alphabet border must be different from the small black "B" in the book, since neither the sizes nor colors match. Forward thinking educators provide many opportunities for children to explore multiple attributes through comparing, sorting, classifying, interacting with manipulatives, and solving problems, because these activities will help children develop their own thinking to a point where work with words and letters has real meaning. Between five and six years old children do begin to conserve, frequently considering two attributes at once, and requiring two memory spaces to do this. At this age children can be ready to learn about letters, numbers, etc., especially if the learning takes place in an emotionally positive environment, and is designed to link with their prior knowledge or life experiences. See: Wolf, Pat. "A Staff Developers Guide to the Brain", National Staff Development Council, 26th Annual Conference, Orlando FL, 1994. (audio tape from National Cassette Services, Int.) Also see Piaget's writings on conservation. If a child will be able to learn from worksheets it will not happen until she/he can draw a diamond. Children who are developmentally about seven years old have learned to draw a diamond, which is the culmination of many factors in physical, brain and visual development. Most children have begun to pass information routinely between the right and left hemispheres of the brain by age seven, allowing them to begin to think abstractly. This is possible because seven year olds have three memory spaces (plus or minus two), enough to realize that the 2-dimensional abstractions on a worksheet are representative of real life while simultaneously considering the content of the worksheet. Also at age seven a child's eyes are typically able to track in a full circle and therefore view an entire page. Prior to this, a child's eyes have progressed on a developmental continuum from tracking vertically, to horizontally, then diagonally and then in a half circle (getting across the page then looking back to the starting point without seeing the lower half of the circle, or page). Also most second graders have outgrown the tendency to farsightedness that is very common through age six, and made seat work especially tiring for first graders. Finally, six wrist bones are fully developed by seven years of age, enabling children to indulge in the small printing favored by many second graders, and appropriate to worksheet lines and spaces. So, when children have matured in these ways, they can draw diamonds and tackle worksheets. Teachers have 18 seconds to grab a child's interest. Actually, every individual has 18 seconds, maximum, to gain anyone's attention! The normal adult brain takes 18 seconds to decide whether to keep or drop input, approximately enough time to hear one sentence from beginning to end. This assumes that attention is directed toward the input from the beginning of the 18 seconds! (Visual, auditory and tactile stimulation are retained or dropped in 3/4 of a second or less. If this information were held longer the brain would overload on things like the feel of clothing against skin.) To retain input longer, the brain may rehearse, using repetition, rhyme, music, movement, etc., or chunk information, tying it to something else already known. Many popular classroom strategies help children to retain information through songs, action poems, repeated readings, etc. See: Wolf, Pat. "A Staff Developers Guide to the Brain", National Staff Development Council 26th Annual Conference, Orlando, FL, 1994. (audio tape from National Cassette Services, Inc.) This text is the sole property of Maria Almendarez Barron and may not be copied or otherwise reproduced without her permission. Watch this web site for further information about brain research and its implication for instruction.