Raisin' Brain: Maintaining Homes for All Kinds of Minds

By: Mel Levine (2006)

School is not the only arena in which children's minds need to be nurtured and expanded. Equally vital is the kind of education and brain building that a student undergoes at home.

Parents can do much to establish a domestic milieu that helps every child to develop his or her very special and sometimes very specialized kind of mind. How does this get accomplished? Let's take a look at some of the measures parents can take to foster optimal intellectual development, to be highly effective at "raisin' brain."

First, parents need to become mind readers - not in the supernatural way, but in a more practical down to earth manner. They need to monitor with care and open-mindedness their child's development over the years, so that they can come to know her or his particular strengths, shortcomings, and areas of talent and natural inclination. Children most often possess minds that differ substantially from those of their siblings; so each child needs to be observed and thought about as the possessor of a uniquely wired brain.

Brain and Cognitive Skills Training

A study by the Department of Education showed that 69 out of 100 fourth graders in the United States are below grade level in Reading. That same study showed that 71 out of 100 eighth graders are below grade level in math, and 76 out of 100 high school seniors are below grade level in writing.

Weak underlying cognitive skills may be the reason why a person struggles to read or learn at a even a basic level. If this is the cause of the learning difficulty, it can be corrected. Research has shown that the brain never stops changing. If you or your child experience learning or reading problems, brain or cognitive skills training can be your most effective choice to eliminate the cause of the struggle, and move on to learning and reading success.

Understanding individual cognitive skills helps us understand how they impact learning. These skills include:

Attention Skills: A student’s ability to attend to incoming information can be observed, broken down into a variety of sub-skills, and improved through properly coordinated training. We train and strengthen the three primary types of attention: