As I read about cognitive and neuroscience and all the amazing ways our brain learns I often see why I was attracted to certain educational philosophies and also why I didn't jump all in. In other words, most of the educational philosophies popular in the homeschooling world have clear strengths and weaknesses when viewed through…
When your child gets bored their brain shuts off. This is not speculation, although we can see the evidence simply by observing children. There is actually research and explanation as to what is going on in the brain when it shuts down the higher learning centers and why it does this. You can read more…
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Source: https://marlaszwast.medium.com/bdnf-builds-better-brains-23df752fac13Date: Aug 23, 2020 BDNF Builds Better Brains How to boost your child's learning abilities. What is BDNF? BDNF is short for brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Basically, BDNF is a protein that is part of the neurotrophin family of growth factor, as the name implies, it is found in the brain. Neurotrophins build and maintain…
Source: https://marlaszwast.medium.com/feeding-your-writing-brain-43c8a3fc37d3Date: Jul 13, 2018 Feeding Your Writing Brain How to Take Care of That Organ that Has All the Ideas 4 min read Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash Writing can be energizing. It can also be exhausting. It takes a great deal of energy to write, because the brain uses up to 20%…
What does loving your kids have to do with their brain health? Everything. "Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, found that children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have a larger hippocampus, a key brain structure that is essential to learning, memory and response to stress, according to a study…
We all know something about healthy eating. Many of us are friends with the guilt of not feeding our kids a perfect diet. You, like me, may have spent hours researching which dietary advice is really backed by science and which is a bunch of hoopla. This post is not about feeling guilty, it is…
Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash In a world of sedentary activity we seem to have increasing problems with thought. The push on academics and the increasing amount of time children spend at their desk have not made our children smarter. Could it be that the answer is not more time at desks, but getting up and jumping…
via GIPHY I was excited to find that Jeff Hawkins touched on the topic of creativity in his book On Intelligence. I think creativity is often highly misunderstood in our current culture. We think doing anything differently than it has been done before is creative. Yet our brain is primed to find patterns. Creativity can…
Why is our brain primed for patterns and relationships? What does focusing on those aspects and ignoring some of the nitty-gritty details of input have to add to our intelligence? Focusing on patterns and relationships allows us to make predictions. This is done continually by our brain, in the background. If a prediction is violated,…