The simplest and fun way to engage young children and reap all the best of benefits for their all round development is to engage them in Brain-gym exercises. In order to target certain areas of the brain or to understand their impact on children’s learning is the main aim of teaching brain gym exercises to children right from a young age. We often hear parents complaining about their children that they have become fidgety, throw tantrums, cannot follow teacher directions, cannot concentrate on tasks, has speech problems and so on.
This is a result of the children getting exposed to a lot of powerful outside distractions such as :
1) Loud background music of films, cartoons, video games and more.
2) Over stimulation- interacting with many adults who continuously try to keep giving information thinking that this will help the child understand things better and earlier.
3) Children getting used as entertainment objects by adults knowingly or unknowingly. Teaching them inappropriate dance movements, role-modeling adult dialogues and songs in front of them.
These are a few examples. The list is really long.
Instead if we can give them enough time to explore things that are child friendly and give scope to their imagination and creativity they will flourish far better in their lives. Simple play things like a ball, a doll, some newspapers, craft papers, glue and some free space makes them very happy as they are now in charge of bringing to reality what is going on in their minds.
Importance of physical and brain exercises is the best gift we can give our kids. Once they get into a routine they like and follow it forever.
Teaching them proper physical and brain exercises will make them healthy, wealthy and wise. In this world of anxiety and stress these exercises are a real boon. They give relaxation, calmness and thus keeps your brain active and fog-free. Using props such as grugru belts, scarves, flash-lights and caps makes it even more exciting as they focus on the activities even better.
In a study they have given the exact relation of the target areas and the areas of education they address.
Target: Areas of the
brain.
Target: Area of
Education
Laterality
Auditory, taking notes,
speech, retention, critical thinking, problem solving,
creativity
Centering
Focus, attention, fidgeting, following directions, listening to the teacher, executive functioning
Focus
Anxiety, anxiousness,
tantrums, meltdowns,
sensory overload, stress