The Family Literacy program added a program called Brain Gym to its Monday session.
“Brain Gym is a system of quick and enjoyable physical activities that directly enhance brain function,” volunteer Ann Frank told The Pilot. “As you know, the Family Literacy program is designed to have class members carry their experience home to their children. Obviously, reading to them is a chief component.”
Frank called the Brain Gym training an exciting new program. She said the center hopes to emphasize the fact that parents are their children’s best teachers. Diana Turner, founder of Footprints Studio, is guiding these parents, training them in a program they will use at home themselves and with their children.
“This will be a continuing program, and this will train us to do Brain Gym,” Frank said. “Studies have shown it to directly increase ability in participants from infants to adults with Alzheimer’s.”
Frank told of one child who had been labeled learning disabled.
“She couldn’t speak, write, or read,” Frank said. “In just five minutes a day, with a counselor, doing Brain Gym activity, that child came up two grade levels within one year.”
According to the Educational Kinesiology Foundation, Brain Gym is a trademarked program of 26 targeted physical activities that enhance learning and cognitive activity.
Frank gave as an example the simple act of running two fingers, like pincers, over the ear from top to bottom and back. The activity is repeated five times.
“It is like pressure points,” she said. “You move your fingers over the rim of your ear from top to bottom. Charts show what part of the brain is affected, hand eye coordination, visual acuity, and so on. For each activity Diana showed a direct correlation to part of the brain.”
The specific research that led to Brain Gym was started in 1969 by Dr. Paul Dennison, then director of California’s eight Valley Remedial Group Learning Centers. He was looking for ways to help children and adults who had been identified as “learning disabled.”
Research led him to the study of kinesiology, the science of body movement and its relationship to brain function. It had already been well established that coordinated physical movement is necessary for brain development.
Researchers noted that babies and young children naturally perform what they came to call developmental movements. These movements serve to aid in forming neural connections in the brain, which are essential to learning. Dennison discovered ways to adapt and sequence these movements in ways that would also be effective for older children and adults.
The result was what he termed Brain Gym: “a system of targeted activities that enhance performance in all areas – intellectual, creative, athletic, and interpersonal.”
Frank said the reaction to Brain Gym of the 11 students in the center’s Family Literacy program was most enthusiastic. They have begun using what they learned already.
“It was absolutely wonderful,” Frank said. “All my moms went in for the training. They all went home and worked on Brain Gym with their children. They do that now as part of our program, work on Brain Gym at home, getting kids ready for class.”
They use it to further their own goals as well.
“I had a very nervous Hispanic mom who had to take a GED test last week,” she said. “She sat in a corner here at the center and did her Brain Gym exercises before going to take the test.”
