Do you know that we need to nurture our child’s mental health? How? Lets do some brain exercise with your child starting today in order to nurture a healthy child!
Physical exercises such as running, jumping, climbing and so on are to help both adults and children to improve blood circulation in the whole body as well as release stress. Regular exercise also help control our child’s body weight and prevent child obesity which is a very common illness among our children nowadays. The main factors that contribute the increasing number of obese child are lack of exercise and unhealthy diet. Adults should do more workouts with children such as playing basketball, football, cycling or jogging as these activities are healthier and beneficial compare to sitting long hours in front of the computer or television playing video games.
Why brain exercises are important for our child? We use our brain every moment as long as we are alive. When we touch something, our nerve sends messages to our brain to analyze the sensation. When we see something, we ask our brain what we’ve seen! Therefore, we need brain exercise to maintain and improve our mental health. The benefits of regular brain exercises for our children are :
- Mental stimulation improves brain function
- Protects against cognitive decline
- Improves learning abilities
Eric Jenson who wrote about Brain-Based-Learning, stated that children need to stand up and stretch their body every 20 minutes. Cross-lateral movement is a very simple brain exercise that we can work with our child either at home or in school. That is moving our arms and legs cross over from one side of the body to the other. The left side of the body movement stimulates the right brain while the right side of the body movement stimulates the left side of the brain. Therefore, both side of the brains are stimulated at the same time which helps energize learning.
A brain exercise experiment has been carried out in Solihull, West Midlands with a group of children with Dyslexia (learning difficulties). Dyslexia children who are requested to perform twice daily brain exercises showed tremendous improvement in their learning abilities. They are able to read and write without extra help. The exercises are simple and fun. For instance, they are asked to stand on a cushion on one leg and then throw a bean bag from one hand to the other.
Here are some brain exercises that we can work with our child every day :
- Flash cards. We can use picture flash cards children less than 4 years old and word flash cards for older children.
- Word searches for older children. This exercise helps stimulate the children’s memory as well as their language development.
- Memory exercises such as memorizing names, telephone numbers, addresses, poems, songs, names of the family trees and so on. This help the child to focus and retain the information in his memory.
- Write or draw using non-dominant hand. For instance, if the child is right-handed, he is encouraged to write or draw using his left hand. This exercise encourages both sides of the brain to work together.
- Obstacles courses such as sports and games that involves both physical and brain coordination in order to achieve a goal. For instance, transferring a ping pong ball with a spoon by walking from one end to the other, requires a child to think on how to coordinate his body movement so that the ball will not drop while walking.
While we are working on the brain exercises with our child, we are also doing the exercises indirectly. Cultivate the importance of exercise in our child’s mind. Nurture our child’s mental and physical health!
