Sunday, October 18, 2009

Yes, Your child wants to learn!


Tiny Children Want To Learn

All children have an insatiable appetite to learn, they want to learn anything and everything around them.  This is also true about young children learning math, although no child would want to learn math until he knows what math is all about.  Under the right circumstances, any child can be taught reading or math at an early age.
Here are the important points about a tiny child’s strong urge to learn and his incredible ability to learn:
  1. The process of learning begins at birth or earlier.
  2. All babies have a  strong desire to learn.
  3. Little kids would rather learn than eat.
  4. Kids would much rather learn than play.
  5. Tiny kids believe it is their job to grow up.
  6. Little kids want to grow up immediately.
  7. All kids believe learning is a survival skill.
  8. They are right in believing this.
  9. Tiny children want to learn about everything immediately.
  10. Math is one of the things worth learning about.

If you observe a child carefully and with the right understanding, you’d notice his incredible urge to learn, to discover.  In fact, a young child between the age of four months and four years is twice as curious as any adult scientist in any field of study.  However, we as adults have made the erroneous judgement that this urge to learn as a child’s short attention span.


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Generally, learning is referred to as the process that goes on in the one who is acquiring knowledge, while educating is often the learning process that is guided by a educator or school.  Although everyone knows this intuitively, these two processes are frequently mistaken as one and the same.
As a result of this we sometimes feel that  the more important processes of learning begins at the age of six since since formal education begins at that age.  And how wrong we are to believe that!
The fact of the matter is that a child begins to learn at birth or earlier.  By the time he is six years of age and begins his schooling he has already absorbed a fantastic amount of information, fact for fact, perhaps more than he will learn in the rest of his life.
Even before he reaches the age of six, a tiny child  has learned most of the basic facts about himself and his family.  He has learned about his neighbors and his relationships to them, his world and his relationship to it, and a lot of other facts that are literally too mind boggling to list.  Most significantly,  he has learned at least one whole language and sometimes more than one.  (The odds  are very small that he will ever really master an additional language after he is six.)
The child has learnt all these even before he has stepped into a class-room.
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The child learns at an astomishing speed unless we somehow slow it down with great effort.   But if we appreciate and encourage this process, it will take place at a truly unbelievable rate.
Fact is, a tiny child has, burning within him, a raging desire to learn.
If we want to stop  this learning desire completely  we have to destroy his entire being.
Maybe by completely isolating him from all external stimulus, we have a chance of quenching his desire to learn.   For instance, we may have read of a fifteen-year-old idiot who is found in an attic chained to a bed-post, presumably because he was thought to be stupid.  The reverse is probably the case.  It is more likely that he is stupid because he was chained to the bed-post.  To appreciate this fact, we must realize  that only psychotic parents would chain any child.  A parent chains a child to a bedpost because the parent is psychotic, and the result is an idiot child because he has been denied virtually all opportunity to learn
We can slow down the child’s desire to learn by limiting the experiences to which we expose him.  Unfortunately, we have done this almost universally by drastically underestimating what he can learn.
On the other had, we can increase his learning markedly simply by removing many of the physical restrictions we have placed upon him.
If we recognize his phenomenal capacity for learning, we can multiply the knowledge he absorbs many times over and give him unlimited opportunities while simultaneously encouraging him to learn.

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We may have heard or read about some isolated but numerous cases of people who have actually taught tiny children to learn the most extraordinary things including math, foreign languages, reading, gymnastics and a host of other things by appreciating and encouraging them.  In all the cases we were able to find, the results of such preplanned home opportunity for children to learn ranged from “excellent” to “astonishing” in producing happy well-adjusted children with exceptionally high intelligence.
It is essential to recognize that these children had not been found to have high intelligence first and then have been given unconventional opportunities to learn, but instead were simply children whose parents decided to expose them to as much information as possible at a very young age.
Once a mother realizes that all tiny children have a insatiable appetite learn and have a superb ability to do so, then respect is added to love, and one wonders how she could ever have missed it in the first place. Observe carefully any child  between the age of one and two-years of age.
First of all, he drives everybody to distraction.
Why is that so? Because he won’t stop sitting still.  He cannot be dissuaded, disciplined or confined out of the desire to learn, no matter how hard we try – and we have certainly tried very hard.  He would rather learn than eat or play.
He wants to learn about the cup and saucer on the coffee table.  The television set, the lamp, the plug in the socket and the magazine and everything else in the room – which means that he switches on the TV,  knocks over the lamp, spills the tea, puts his finger in the electric light socket and tears up the magazine.  He is learning constantly and quite naturally, we can’t stand it.
When we observe the way he behaves we have concluded that he is hyperactive and unable to pay attention to anything.  The simple truth is that he pays attention to everything.  He is supremely alert in every way he can be to learning about the world.  He sees, hears, feels, smells and tastes.  There is no other way to learn except by these five pathways into the brain, and the child uses them all.
He sees the TV and feels it and hear what it sounds like when he pats the screen loudly with his grubby hands.  He sees the lamp and  pulls it down so that he touch  it, look at it, smell it and even taste it.  Given the opportunity, he will do all these things to the TV and the lamp and he will do the same to every object in the room.  He will want to stay in the room until  he has absorbed all he can, through every sense available to him, about every object in the room.  He is doing his best to learn and of course we are doing our best to dissuade him because his learning process hurts our wallet.
The good news is, you can help your child to learn reading, math and have an encyclopedic knowledge in a far less expensive manner.  With the help of theGenius Maker  software that is based on the principals of Glenn And Janet Doman.
So give your child a headstart in life with the GeniusMaker™.
regards,

Monday, October 5, 2009

Autism, Dyslexia And Genius


Having a child with dyslexia or autism may be stressful for parents.  Some children with such ailments may exhibit behavior that is associated with genius.  Learn what are the options open to parents to cope and bring out the best in the child.
There have been much research into possible links between dyslexia and genius and it continues to be  ongoing, but it is clear that no child with dyslexia is precluded from being a genius.  Leonardo da Vinci is an example.  We cannot know for sure whether or not he was dyslexic, but from studying the material he left, it is certain that the letters in his notes emulate what can be a sign of dyslexia; all his letters are reversed.  As we all know, this certainly didn’t stop him from having brilliant ideas.  Indeed, some research argues that it may have been his dyslexic ability that was a major factor that contributed to his gift for visualizing his ideas in such detail, and recreating them in his drawings so vividly.

Autism is something that most people are unfamiliar with and unless you have encountered it yourself.  It is a myriad of conditions, in which a child can also have what are known as islets of ability.  These islets are very special indeed and make the rest of our ability  pale into insignificance in the kinds of creativity they often display.

  If you are unfamiliar with the kind of things I am driving at, you may recall the film Rainman starring Dustin Hoffman, whose character had a fantastic ability in mathematics that enabled him to work out in his head the odds of winning in casino games.  This kind of thing is not impossible for children or adults with autism.
From a very young age, the world-famous artist Steven Wiltshire was not only able to draw, but also produced sketches which commanded a complete understanding of perspective, architecture and dimension – a maturity in ability that otherwise can take years to develop to the degree of accuracy exhibited in his work.  Tending to mix these high levels of creative ability with difficulty in being able to form empathy with others, the condition remains a perplexing one.  However, research to date suggests that genius and autism are not mutually exclusive.  Indeed,  not all children with autism are comfortable around lots of people they are unfamiliar with, as is the scenario with a summer school programme, the children with autism I have known have handled it very well, and attended programmes voluntarily.  It all depends on the individual child.  So if your child does have autism, depending upon how comfortable they feel around other people, enrichment programmes are definitely worth exploring.  Early childhood educational programs may also be beneficial to some degree.
It is quite clear that  the guidance given here on children with special educational needs can only be general, it is not intended to be otherwise, and cannot replace a specific diagnosis of your child’s abilities.  The key point to be note is that while there is much research still to be done, there are clearly some huge areas of potential overlap between what might be construed as genius and children with special educational needs.

If your child is attending a special school, find out if the school is aware of the full range of your child’s gifts that  you have discovered.  Parent’s evenings are the best time to do this as you, your child and teachers are all present, creating the opportunity for open and positive discussion.
Remember that teachers are there to help and advise, and are with your child five days a week.  Working together you have a better chance of coming up with a winning plan for your child’s success.  Are there any other factors that you need to take into consideration that may be helping or blocking your child’s performances at school, for instance, relationships with peers and teachers.  Once you and your child are happy that no stone has been left unturned, and that you have worked out a good plan of action with your school, set a date to review how the plan is going and/or make any adjustments at that time.

For Further Reading .....
For more information on early childhood education and how to increase your child's intelligence, you'll probably want to take a look at the Genius Maker program. It’s an amazing program to teach your child not only to read, but learn mathematical skills and gain an encyclopedic knowledge. Well worth checking out!
You can visit the TeachMyBaby web