What people say

What people say.

With both heart and mind.

This is a topic that is particularly close to my heart (no pun intended!).

It’s very well put; we need to support and create communities of all sorts (and specially schools) where the whole person gets honored, nurtured, supported and stimulated. We have for a long time now put a lot of emphasis on the left side of our brain; reasoning, detail oriented, language, numbers and it’s gotten us to the point where we have a hard time with our right hemisphere; big picture, color, music, fluidity etc. etc. We value language and math over most everything else, and we force children and adults to learn these skills in a way that doesn’t work for everyone.

If we can bring back ‘the heart’ and teach from heart-centered- learning (applied to learning all skills) learning is natural, intuitive, inspiring and empowering.  That is what I envision for our schools, our communities and the world at large!

Thanks to the Heart Math Institute – you folks are awesome!!!

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What are we teaching???

 

Really?

This is what we are teaching our children? And we think that leads to happy, healthy, independent, secure, stable, engaged, responsible and inspired adults? I don’t think so………. I can’t imagine growing up with this type of horrible activities (practicing for a lock-down) – we just breed fear and more fear. I think we need to re-think as a society how we’re handling the violence that seems so prevalent – I don’t claim to have the solution, however I don’t think we’re on the ‘right’ track!

Fear is very debilitating to our brain – it doesn’t make us think creatively, outside the box, with new ideas and awareness. We just end up functioning from our very basic fight/flight mechanism – no learning happens there…….

I hope we can come up with a different approach to all this very very soon.

Playing in the rain…….

Yes! The rain is back!

The question is do you get to enjoy it? Or do you dread it? If we let children do as they please, they LOVE playing in the rain and it’s a most marvelous sensory experience! They don’t care about getting wet (as long as they get dry again afterwards), they don’t care about the mud splashes, they just don’t worry about things getting ‘messy’.

The fall is a wonderful season of different experiences for our sensory system – wet, cold, windy…….. those are important experiences to have. So let’s enjoy them, play with your children in the rain and make a muddy mess!

Learn through play

I’m just getting ready to get on my soap-box again.

Could we just please let children play??? We are creating

no space for kids to just hang out, play, figure things out together, learn about each other, boundaries, rules, agreements, relating, etc. etc. etc. Children do a phenomenal job when left to their own growth – as adults we shouldn’t be there to tailor make that process to what WE think a child needs to learn. Children have an uncanny ability to learn exactly what they are ready for, when they are ready for it.

Adults, school, society and church coming up with standardized processes on what each child should learn, just does not work! We then create children who start resenting learning, because it is not where they are in their developmental process. Then we end up with kids who are not motivated do learn at all, because what they HAVE to learn is so removed from their actual life and life experience.

We are wonderful, creative, inventive, amazing, insightful, smart, delightful and inspiring beings when we are children, let’s feed and nurture that!

Stepping of soap-box.

Learning challenged how?

One of the things I find over and over again in working with people, is a certain disconnect between left and right hemisphere. The information and knowledge available on the left side and the information and knowledge on the right side just don’t seem to connect. Which results in being able to do one thing, but not in combination with another activity.

It’s the person you go on a walk with – and every time conversation starts to happen, they just stop walking in order to talk. (often this is masked by “looking at something else” as a cover-up ~ because not being able to walk and talk at the same time is judged by others!)

In this simple example of reading ~ it means being able to see the letters, name the letters, however not being able to put the letters together to form the word. An ongoing struggle for a lot of people who we label as “dyslexic”.

Or as my friend Michael Hagedorn ( check him out at crataegus.com) says, there’s the word ‘fork’ on the left side and the right side of his brain will come up with three images simultaneously. Hard to choose which on is the ‘appropriate’ image!

I will start blogging on tools you can use yourself to help with these issues soon!