What is the hype about “right brain training” anyway?

Why is right brain training and creative thinking skills important for future generation?

What is the hype about “right brain thinking” anyway? Why the fuss? Why the focus? And above all, is it worth our time? Before we divulge some best practices (implemented at Discover Me) regarding the benefits of right brain engagement, we want to tell you that, yes you the reader….you can still train your brain and think “differently”.

Why think differently?

What is the difference anyway?

Hang in there! Neither what we are about to reveal is anything new, nor it is as complicated as learning to swim or driving a car. All you need to do is, appreciate the types of processing related to the right and left sections of your brain and practice engaging them both.

If you are like me, you think with your left brain, at least most of the time! You execute your tasks with logic and order. This means, all daily math related computations – adding up groceries while you shop, pouring left-over food in the appropriate container, budgeting your expenses and even planning a party at home. Marvelous isn’t it? The left hemisphere is also dominant in language processing. You hear something, you recognize the language and you reply accordingly. Recall what you had for dinner last night. What was the name of the last movie you saw in the theater? What was the name of your childhood pet? Thanks to your left brain processing, you know the answers to those questions.

The right brain deals with creativity. The right brain will help you analyze the tone and the context of the person speaking to you. It will help you react to the tone! Did you have the moment of euphoria when you recognized a friend fifteen years post high-school? Thank your right brain that is mainly in charge of spatial abilities and face recognition. What about nostalgia associated with those notes of music you heard as a child? Have you ever hung a wall-hanging approximately adjacent to the window? Estimations and rough comparisons are also within the realm of the right brain. The right brain also helps you make sense of the visuals and imagery. 

Creative thinking is something we as adults are required to indulge in when solving problems at work and at home. Creative thinking enables us to carry out the left brain processing in the desired direction. Creativity and innovation have been the corner stone to success in any project.

How many times are we praised with terms like “genuine”, “unique”, “out of the box thinking” or even “revolutionary idea”. The right brain is responsible for most of these laurels.

Mind Mapping Exercises for Right Brain Engagement

At Discover Me, we promote right brain thinking through many activities. Research indicates that drawing exercises engages the right brain processing. When subjected to such exercises at a young age, we arouse the creative thinker in the candidate.

Mind Mapping is a technique originally created by Tony Buzan. It uses words connected with arrows or lines. It’s a good way of representing a large amount of interconnecting information in a fairly compact way, and many people also use it for planning presentations or taking notes in meetings. Mind maps include rich pictures that are color-coded, interconnected, radiating from a central idea or a word. How many times have we used this strategy at work as adults? Replacing all words with pictures creates an even more powerful mind map. Perhaps one of the greatest utilization of mind maps is understanding (or demonstrating) a complex idea or a concept. Mind mapping promotes visual thinking that enables the individual to relate ideas presented across the academic curriculum. So a child who is trained to depict ideas visually, will be able to internalize complex information much easily as compared to a child who tried to envision the idea in logical order.

Think of the long-term benefits of this healthy habit cultivated in your child at Discover Me!

Three-dimensional drawing is also a great tool to engage the right brain. At Discover Me, the learner is required to draw and improve this skill until they get as close to the real image as possible. What starts as a tough exercise (especially for artistically challenged individuals) yields into subsequent ease and enjoyable experiences. The idea is to enable your child to think and express visually.

Conclusion

In the current academic setting, where rote memorization continues to dominate the success criteria, creative thinking is compromised. What use are the facts acquired in memory when you cannot apply them in the dynamic real world context. At Discover Me, we prepare creative individuals who are well-equipped to succeed in ambiguous situations. Never underestimate the combined power of the right and left brain thinking!

Turn off the Tube

5 Steps to Raise Self-Engagement Habits in your Child

Turn off the Tube

Why let afternoons idle in front of the tube and vacations amok with broken house rules? I mean, as a growing child, didn’t most of us did the same? If we are repeating history, despite being guilty of our so-called education, then we are worse off than our parents! Is the tube the only way to relax and unwind? Did you know that the T.V is the fastest way to put out creative fires in your child? Especially with cartoons with video game versions that just feed off each other with no meaning and moral in the story line. Moreover, a child learns more with hands on activities than simply watching someone else do it. Let’s engage our children in more creative ways before the next fist fight over the remote!

  

Encourage engaging activities

Is it felt-tip pen drawing that keeps your child rooted in a chair? Is it baking cupcakes? Is it Lego? Or is it mixing paint. Find out the creative side of your child and attune yourself to their creative outlet preferences. Once established, invest in these creative platforms. If it is paints, spend a weekend on buying paints of varying textures. If it is markers, help them develop a collection. By doing so, you are directly encouraging them to engage in their creative activities. Remember, these are their natural, unadulterated creative hobbies. Something that comes intrinsically from them. Not only will they invest more time in such activities, but also produce quality work. This will set the tone for other not-so-preferred tasks. Activities based purely on process, experiencing colors, textures, feel associated with it rather than results it produces.   

Practice Journal or Blog Writing to Communicate with children

In this digital age, raising digital learners, do not create a technological chasm between you and your children and label it as the over rated “generation gap”. In fact, use technology to your benefit by creating mandatory blog writing activities with one single topic: Reflections. Indeed, we reveal more in writing that we intend to. Text-based dialogue is more expressive and even pulls out the most passive issues in the deeper recesses of our minds. Encourage your children to maintain a daily blog on a family website. With a plethora of tools available like Google Sites, Word press and Wix.com, you can quickly create a family account and communicate your writing practice requirements more effectively. You will notice an occasional paragraph or two with some genuine ideas on a creative activity. What they won’t tell you, they will definitely write! We @discoverme encourage children to keep brief account of their daily interactions based on theme of their weekly session —what worked or didn’t work, what they tried,etc either in blog or diary(kids choose their medium)

Practice Using the Design Process to Increase the Quality of Work

Create a culture of “version control” over activities that require greater time and energy expenditure. This helps improve the quality of their performance by providing them with the much needed room for error. For example, the version 1 of the project can only be the final version when everyone is satisfied and find no improvements to make. This habit is a positive step towards accepting constructive feedback and view problems as a systems view. Help your child develop blue prints before tackling their favorite projects. Explain how engineers build prototypes, respond to critical feedback, and refine their design before going into production. Similarly, artists make sketches of big works and revise their ideas before creating their final piece. Drive your children towards high quality work by working in increments and improving through feedback. Process is more focused during the session flow with children taking them though the journey of first draft to final on

Showcase Big Projects

When your child invests their time and energy on a project, regardless of how it turns out, make it a big deal. Teach them the value of hard work and dedication more than the result. Reward them for their diligence and persistence more than the end product. Display their work in an area where it can become a conversation piece with guests and other family members. Take pictures and boast on social media. Share your friend’s comments with your child. Just make it a big deal. Talk about real-life experts that are related to your child’s hobby. Watch or read their biography to deduce their personality, professionalism and work ethics. In this way, you are creating multiple role models for your child to look up to and emulate.We encourage kids to post on their blog and during our session talk more about feelings attached to it –do they feel motivated by efforts they put in .

Our best advice yet? Register for a session or two at Discover Me and learn about your child in a few weeks in a way you never expected! Few of the activities we do @DISCOVERME.

·        Play a game of what if with child wherein you make a statement “what if the sun was pink in color” and the kid makes an another statement saying “maybe and what if the in the pink sun lived a purple cat". Build a scenario or a story using the process mentioned above.

·        Pick any article (pen, fork, etc) and with the child list out as many uses as you can think of for the object. All ideas, however crazy, are ok in the game. Target 50 uses!

·        Draw a picture showing how you would make old enemies like a cat and a goldfish become friends.

·        Act out, with a small group, how you would make friends with an alien visiting Earth.

Let’s EXPLORE, EXPERIENCE, ENHANCE, EMPOWER, & ENJOY OUR CHILD’S POTENTIAL.