Smart Moves: Why Learning Is Not All In Your Head by Carla Hannaford should be required reading for every parent and teacher. And it may help you personally as well.

The main idea of this comprehensive book is that it is our body movements that create and strengthen the neural networks necessary for skills like reading, writing and higher order thinking. In order for this to happen properly, children need time and unstructured play, and also love and support, which engender positive emotions. That emotion affects learning is the other important point in the book. Positive emotions are associated with the neurotransmitters that encourage, rather than inhibit, learning, while stress is associated with the opposite. A student’s interest in learning is actually necessary to the learning itself. Hannaford backs these assertions up with science, citing numerous studies. In one example, rats running on a wheel grow double the number of nerve cells, but not if they are forced to run.

Luckily, if someone has difficulties learning, even severe ones, movement can help at any time. Sometimes a few simple movements are all that is needed to integrate knowledge that has been acquired but is somehow all jumbled up or separated in different parts of the brain. Hannaford explains the benefits of, and how to do, a number of simple Brain Gym® movements. I learned the basics of Brain Gym® two years ago, and since then I have noticed the positive effects in me and also in some of my friends and tutoring students with whom I have used it. However, these effects are nothing compared to the cases of children with severe difficulties that Hannaford includes in the book. She shows how Brain Gym® can dramatically benefit children in reading, writing and communicating, including children with autism, ADHD, post-traumatic stress, and even a girl who lost an entire hemisphere of her brain. In one instance, Hannaford did only a fifteen-minute Brain Gym® activity with a boy with Down’s syndrome who had been unsuccessfully trying to learn his numbers from one to ten. Although he had been working with his teacher on it for three months, the movements were the missing piece – he was able to correctly distinguish the numbers from that day on.

Hannaford explains the detailed anatomy of the nervous system and how it develops in stages, and how movements play specific and important roles in the developmental stages. Children NEED to move. She also illustrates how some educational systems honor and work with natural development (the Danish, where children spend their first seven years in unstructured outdoor play and then soon after attain 100% literacy) and how some don’t, for example ours.

What is wrong with the way we are bringing up and educating children? For one thing, we have them NOT moving, sitting at desks at an early age and forcing them to read and write before their eyes are sufficiently developed. Eyes develop in time and with movement. We’re not giving most children enough time, and if they’re watching TV at such a young age they’re probably not getting enough movement. Then children that have difficulties reading or sitting still, both unnatural and unhealthy activities for their age, are labeled as having learning disabilities and are often drugged.

The educational system was even more wrong in Singapore, where they once taught children reading at age three and four. As a result, 85% became nearsighted and needed glasses by age five, and nearly 100% needed glasses by age 10. Singapore then changed their system, taking a cue from the Danish.

When children have difficulty reading because their bodies and brains are not sufficiently developed, they experience stress and other negative emotions that only make it MORE difficult to learn. What is the value in getting kids to read at such a young age? I don’t think there is any. Hannaford herself was unable to read until age ten, but it did not adversely affect her future: she went on to earn a Ph.D. in biology and become a world-renowned author and educator.

Hannaford touches on other aspects of our lives that affect our learning, such as nutrition. She also makes a convincing case against ANY television watching for children below a certain age. TV inhibits learning in many ways other than that we are not moving; for example, we respond to the light flicker of changing scenes with our fight-or-flight stress response.

She also touches on learning profiles, something she has since written an entire book about: The Dominance Factor: How Knowing Your Dominant Eye, Ear, Brain, Hand and Foot Can Improve Your Learning. When you are stressed, you may be limited in a particular way due to your dominance profile. For example, you may not efficiently receive information visually, but you may be able to learn through hearing it. I discovered from my profile that when I am stressed I do not communicate well, which I have experienced during my teaching career!

The only thing missing from this book is the work of an editor. It is a shame for a book with such great content to be, even in its second edition, this rife with grammatical and typographical errors. Yet although the writing could be cleaned up and it could be more readable in some parts, it is still highly recommended reading.