CM 4 Episode  #18 Nature Explorers: Brain Training To Enhance our Children’s Potential with guest Cindy West

CM 4 Episode #18 Nature Explorers: Brain Training To Enhance our Children’s Potential with guest Cindy West

Links and Resources:

Show Notes:

Cindy West is passionate about homeschooling joyfully and loves to share strategies to tackle things that tend to steal joy in the day-to-day grind..

A 19-year veteran of homeschooling with a master’s degree in education, Cindy has graduated two children and is currently homeschooling an 8th grader. She’s a Charlotte Mason homeschooler at heart, but knows that any method or curriculum must be adjusted to work with the needs of individual families and even individual children. One of her specialties is helping parents figure out the best ways to tweak homeschooling to find great success.

She teaches monthly, online Homeschool Masterclasses to parents and regularly shares creative and encouraging homeschooling solutions on her blog, Our Journey Westward. She has written several helpful books and curricula such as Homeschooling Gifted Kids and the popular NaturExplorers series. Teaching twice monthly, online classes to 1st-8th graders during No Sweat Nature Study LIVE lessons is one of her very favorite pursuits ever. She and her students have so much fun learning science and creating nature journal pages together!

Brain training is one topic that she sort of fell into by accident and found that it makes a world of difference when taken seriously

https://ourjourneywestward.com/brain-training/

https://ourjourneywestward.com/brain-training-activities-auditory-attention/

https://ourjourneywestward.com/visual-attention-and-visual-processing/

https://ourjourneywestward.com/downloads/brain-training/

https://ourjourneywestward.com/independent-brain-training-games/

https://www.facebook.com/OurJourneyWestward

https://www.instagram.com/ourjourneywestward/

It is so important even as adults to think about what I am lacking in and to work on habits of our own. Cindy West

Our brains do age and it is important to continue strengthening them just as you would muscles. Cindy West

Picture study is one of the key ways that you can start with comprehension. Cindy West

We are making habits whether we know we are making them or not. We can make bad ones or be intentional on making good ones. Julie Ross

We are giving our children a blessing by starting early in giving them good habits. Cindy West


Proverbs 4:20-23 “ My son pay attention to what I say; turn your ears to my words. Do not let them out of your sight, keep them within your heart; for they are life to those who find them and health to one's whole body. Above all else guard your heart for everything flows from it.”

Show Transcript:

Julie –

Welcome to the Charlotte Mason Show, a podcast dedicated to discussing Miss Mason’s philosophy, principles, and methods. It is our hope that each episode will leave you inspired and offer practical wisdom on how to provide this rich living education in your modern homeschool. So, pull up a chair. We're glad you're here.

Today's episode of the Charlotte Mason Show was brought to you by Medi-share. Find out more about this affordable Christian alternative to traditional health insurance at medishare.com.

Today, I'm going to be having a conversation with Cindy West from Nature Explorers, and we're actually going to be talking about a concept called brain training and how doing these brain-training type activities can enhance your children's potential, especially children that might have some cognitive difficulties in terms of processing or perception, attention, memory, and how these brain training can really help, not only these students but also every student really can benefit from that.

Cindy West is passionate, homeschooling, and joyfully loves to share strategies to tackle things that tend to steal jewelry in the day-to-day grind. So, she is just fun and exciting, and I really just enjoyed our conversation. She's a 19-year veteran Homeschooler with a master’s degree in education and she's a Charlotte Mason Homeschool at heart but knows that any method or curriculum must be adjusted to work with the needs of the individual, family, and even individual children. Can we all get an amen for that?

She teaches homeschool masterclasses and on her blog Our Journey Westward, there is so much information. She has just created so many wonderful homeschooling resources. Some of them, including homeschooling gifted kids, and the popular nature explorers. She also has no sweat nature study. I love that. But brain training is a topic that she sort of fell into by accident, but that found it made a world of difference and she really enjoys teaching homeschool moms to how to incorporate this simple practice into their days because she's seeing how powerful it is in the lives of her own children.

So, I'm excited to talk with Cindy West. Let's jump into our conversation on brain training.

Hi everyone, welcome. Today. I am so excited to be talking here with Cindy West and I really wanted you to come on because I love how you incorporate kind of working with children who might have some you know, cognitive, I don't know what the correct word is, just delays or impairments, but how to do that in the context of Charlotte Mason?

Because I don't know anyone who kind of does that with what you're talking about, and I think it's so key and so important. Cause I hear all the time like I really love Charlotte Mason and her philosophy and approach to education, but my kid struggles with XYZ and so I don't think it's a good fit. And I'm like no, it's like the best education for kids who struggle with those areas. And I know that just from my own experience, but I know you have a passion for that as well.

So, before I get started, can you just kind of tell people who you are and what you do if they aren't familiar?

Cindy -

Sure. So, I am Cindy West and I have been blogging at Our Journey Westward for I think I counted up fourteen years, which is incredible to me.

J -

I know. When you say ??? How can I make this old?

C -

Well, no kidding. Because I'm, I've been homeschooling 19 now. So...

J -

Must've started when you're like two right?

C -

I think so. I surely. So yeah, you start to look in the mirror at a certain point, and realize, yes, I really have been homeschooling. All of these have names, that's right. I have three kiddos and two of them have graduated. One has already graduated with a bachelor's from college and the other with an associate's from college, and he may go back for a bachelor's before too long. But he's actually pursuing a music career right now, so that's pretty exciting. And I'm only homeschooling one. But all the way through I had come out of the public school system, so I taught for approximately five years before I wanted to be home with my first baby. She's 24 now. So, I've been out of the public school system for a long time, but I knew as we started just playing school. You know, with a preschooler.

I knew that when we got real, I didn't want it to look like the classroom.

So just like everybody else, probably always says I read the life-changing book For the Children's Sake, by Susan Schafer McCauley and it crafted such a vision in me that I thought, we are going to have different education and that's how we landed on a Charlotte Mason. That's what I would say I identify with most. Of course, I think everybody does bits and pieces here and there that work for their family when certain things otherwise don't. So, I would call myself maybe an eclectic Charlotte Mason homeschooler. But Charlotte Mason is what I identify with most. And we've done that all the way through these 19 years. Growing and changing and you know, making it our own, but it has been the thing all these 19 years.

J -

Yeah, and I think that's such good advice too for people because I feel like we can get stressed out that we have to fit into this box, and if we don't fit into it then we're not actually giving your children a Charlotte Mason education, which I don't believe. I think you do have to make it your own. Every family's so unique, especially with Covid and all the different challenges like you have to be willing to be flexible to make it work long term.

C -

Well, and that's what I always looked at for us. You know, there's a principle that kind of umbrellas the actual method. Or principles, I should say. But we've taken those principles and we have made them work and not necessarily worried whether the method was being done perfectly. So, for instance, you know the principle of short lessons, the idea of habit training, nature study. All of those things we have, I've kind of made our what we are as a fabric of our homeschool and then the way those things have been implemented have been in ways that have worked best for us in different seasons because different seasons have looked different for us.

J -

Oh yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I think that's totally how we do it as well. I love that. So, talking about this concept of brain training then. So how did you get interested, hear about it? Think oh, I should probably start doing this with my kids?

C -

Yeah, great idea or question. So, I love the habit training portion of Charlotte Mason's. Really.

J -

Even if you don't homeschool, if you just read her habit training stuff like it'll change your whole family, right?

C -

It will change everything and it's just so important, even as adults to think about, what am I slacking in or lacking in or, and so you can work on habits within yourself. And so, I started to see that there were certain habits that were just becoming a little bit of a booger for one of my kiddos in particular. And I knew from my educational background that, had this kiddo been in school, we probably would have been having ADHD discussions.

And so, I was so thankful that I never ever ever had to label that kiddo with that label that would go with him the rest of his life. And so, I met our preacher's wife at church, actually. She was hosting a brain training seminar and we had had a chance to chit-chat a little bit about active boys, and you know, some of the things that go along with a lack of attention and that kind of thing and she said, well, a lot of that stuff is executive functioning skills. And those are things like your attention, your focus, your memory, your comprehension even and your logical thinking so that you decide does this logically make sense for me to act like this or to follow through like this? And so, she said, I have met a lady who does brain training and she's going to come and teach us all about those executive functioning skills and different ways that we can work on them at home.

Now, this lady is a brain training lady, and she will have people come to her office and she will, you know she'll help everybody. You can do this for anybody who struggles with executive functioning skills from ADHD or dyslexia, brain injury. She worked with Down syndrome. So just, the whole gamut. You can do it with Alzheimer's patients. And essentially what it is, the whole idea is, that games because these brain training activities are very game-like and the games that you play will build neurons in your brain that kind of help connect the left and the right side together with more strength. And that in turn strengthens those executive functioning skills.

So, you have this specific plan of we've got an executive functioning skill that we need to work on, or more than one with this kiddo, or these kiddos, and so we're going to specifically train that skill into them, which goes with habit training, right? And in the process, it's strengthening brain connections in there so that it sticks. And we saw drastic improvements.

J -

Wow, that's great that you were able to go to a class and learn all that.

C -

That is so great.

J -

??? of the terminology and the distinction. I'm glad that they're using the term executive functioning disorders more than ADHD because I think a lot of people are like, well, like, it's not like hyperactive, they're not jumping off and down things. And I have two daughters who have ADD and I didn't know for a very long time because they weren't hyperactive and their girls, and so it wasn't until later on when that I realized you know that attention we've been working on this habit for a long time. The attention is lacking or the memory or the ability to focus. And like you said, taking it as an approach from the executive functioning standpoint. You know even as an adult, it's helped me to realize no, I am kind of weak in these areas. I need to get improvement on them as well or as I'm getting older, I think my brain's starting to go the other direction sometimes.

So, playing games like that you have on your website and things I've actually really helped me with my ability to remember things.

C -

Absolutely. In fact, I mean when you go to training as I attended, you will learn that you know our brains do age. And it's really, really important to continue strengthening just like we would continue strengthening muscles to strengthen that brain. And you probably have seen apps and things like that on your phone that can be brain training apps. Those are kind of sort of similar to the hands-on activities that we're pulling into the homeschool and I do them too. I mean, I'm doing them alongside my kiddos or now my one kiddo and it's strengthening my brain as well, which is never a bad thing.

J -

No, no. And I think Charlotte Mason, you know she was so ahead of her time in terms of like understanding neuroscience and how our brains work in that field was just in its infancy, right? But now we're able to see with you know MRI's and things. Oh wait, she actually had a lot to say about that, but she really does talk about how the habits and the things that we do actually make physical impressions within our brains.

C -

Oh, for sure.

J -

And it just boggles my mind how amazing, she was and ahead of her time, yeah.

C -

Yes, she really was, and a lot of it didn't really have a ton of science to back up anything.

It was just intuitiveness in many ways. And you know, I think about that as being a parent. There have been lots of things that I have been intuitive about that, then I later learn, oh my goodness, there's research to back this up, you know? Even us knowing that creating the habits is a good thing if we've never had any formal training on how habits need to take a month to stick, or that it's really, really good to insert habits step by step by step by step. Those are kind of intuitive things for parents.

J -

And really, that's like, so foundational. Not just for our children, but for us in our success in life, you know? And but we don't see that as valuable. I think a lot of us missed that we didn't have that in our education, right? But we're able to give our kids these gifts and these habits, and these skills, like these executive functioning skills. It doesn't matter what they end up doing in life. If you have the ability to be attentive, to have good focus, to memory, to have good comprehension, you're going to be successful, so it really is such an important thing to include in your education.

But how would that parent know? Well, let's just talk basically first, what are these cognitive skills?

C -

Okay, so the ones that I have specifically focused on are five of them, and the first is attention, and that's the ability to do all of the focusing things. ??? Various focusing kinds of things, so you need to be able to focus in general. You need to be able to focus when other things are going on around you. You need, so you've got to be able to, you're, when you do the brain training, very typically a lot of the activities will involve a lot of change, a lot of movement, a lot of sound so that the training of the keeping your attention or where the attention needs to be is strengthened even more. Because we're always, we have so many different inputs coming in and we have to learn how to focus on what the main thing is. So, attention is the focus as well.

Then there is processing. So, we take in information through our eyes and through our ears. So, you've got visual processing and auditory processing. And so, you have, can you even take those things in and comprehend them? So, comprehension is one of them. But how quickly do you do that? That's called processing speed. So processing is number two, but it's got a couple of components to it. And then we'll go ahead and put comprehension in there because, I usually put it forth, but we talked about it. So, comprehension is essentially broken down into this idea of it is the ability to picture something in your head so that you can then repeat it and understand it. So, duration and artist study. Artist picture study. Picture study is one of the key ways that you can actually start with comprehension. And that's just in having your kiddo look at a picture, stare at it for 30 seconds, take it away, and then either let them narrate back to what they saw. But more importantly, after you ask little bitty questions or have them you know little facts of colors or people or whatever they saw, start asking them to tell you a story. Well, what kind of story do you think was behind this picture from this artist and why do you think that. And so, every time you can get them to solidify an actual image in their mind to understand a story they are going to be able to comprehend better, whether it's something they're reading, you know, for pleasure or even a direction for a worksheet that they have to do. So that's the basis of comprehension.

And then memory is then number four, and there are couple types of memory So there is, well there are three types. There's a long term. You know you want to be able to remember your phone number long term, right? But short term, I might need to remember your phone number for the next five minutes. And then there is what's called working memory, and it's very similar to the idea of that attention where there are lots of different things going on at the same time. Well, working memory is similar to that. So, working memory is, I'm playing a game and I have to consistently remember what the new thing is as it changes. And we can talk about some of these game examples shortly. But let me put it in a practical. So, if I tell you that I need you to go and do four chores. And you finished the first one, your memory has to be able to work to say that one's gone. What were the other three? So that's kind of a practical example of working memory.

And then the fifth one that I have studied is logic. Logical thinking. You can think of it in terms of critical thinking or problem-solving. It's actually a higher-order thinking skill, so, if you picture a ladder when you know something and remember something those are kind of the bottom two rungs on the ladder. But when you can analyze it, when you can compare it, when you can do something with it, when you can break it down into its part, different parts, then you are walking up this ladder of having to think more and having to pull more bits and parts together in your brain in order for those higher things to happen.

So, problem-solving and logical thinking are higher-order thinking skills and they can be trained in so many, all of these can really, but in so many easy and practical ways.

J -

Yeah. That's great. That's a very good overview of those for people who aren't familiar with those, so thank you for that.

Today's episode is brought to you by A Gentle Feast. A Gentle Feast is a complete curriculum for grades one through twelve, that is family-centered, inspired by Miss Mason's programs and philosophy, and rooted in books, beauty, and Biblical truth. You can find out how smooth and easy days are closer than you think at www.agentlefeast.com

How would a parent know, okay, my child struggles in one of those areas, or all of those areas, or do you just recommend kind of training overall?

C -

Well, I mean, you're going to notice. Pretty clearly, I mean. If they're not paying attention, if you're trying to do something with them and they're looking out at the bird in the window, that's attention. If you give them four directions of a chore that you need them to do and all of the sudden, they've forgotten the last three after they finished the first, that's a memory issue. If you're constantly seeing that they read a direction or they can't, they can't narrate to you easily even after some pretty good work and starting with short kinds of things, like maybe Aesop's fables or something, you know you're probably dealing with some comprehension issues. You can pick out all of those things pretty easily, but I will say that there is zero harm.

J -

Yeah exactly.

C -

Training any of those. And a lot of times the activities that you use with your kiddos, they're covering so many of those anyway.

J -

Yes, right. I think that's a really good point. Yeah, like this isn't going to cause harm, so no matter what, you're going to see the benefit of it. And even if they do have good attention, right? It's a skill that can get better, or they have good working memory, you know? And I think of an example of for my own, one of my own kids in terms of like that working memory in terms of narration is I noticed they would always just tell me what happened at the end. So, I would read a passage and then I'd be like, okay, so what happened? And they would tell me that the ending of the passage. No. They couldn't remember all the way back to the beginning, so I really had to scaffold that and kind of prompt them of saying, okay, so, and I'll say like what happened at the beginning. So, Goldilocks left to go on a picnic. And then I would just stop and let them kind of go, because otherwise they didn't have that or drawing pictures or kind of mapping that out. I saw that on your website, kind of helping them learning like the beginning, middle, end. Cause kids that have kind of that working memory, that attention, I notice that my kids with ADHD especially and my daughter has dyslexia like the ability to kind of sequence things with it can be difficult. Yeah.

C -

And there are couple of ways you can help with that. So what you're talking about on my website was just a simple piece of paper, you guys, that you basically make three columns, and as you read, particularly in the beginning, you read aloud and they just draw something that prompts a memory for them of something they heard in the beginning of that story, and then as you continue to read, add a new one to the middle of the page. And then at the end something from the end. And then that picture allows them to be able to then narrate back to you in an easier fashion.

You could easily stretch that out into comic strips where you fold a paper, maybe in eight parts, and open it back up and they have little blocks. Or you could just let them free draw one simple picture where they're continually adding anything that they necessarily hear, that means something to them. Those, all of those things can build the pictures. That's what we're trying to do. Build pictures. So, let me take this back one more way. Do you know how sometimes we have kiddos who don't, let's just say addition? They don't understand addition. So, what is a mom's first response? Go grab some cereal or some M&Ms or some pennies or something and you start playing with them. You start building, touching, understanding. We call it hands-on manipulatives, right? So, what we're doing when we get out those pennies and we start saying, okay, now we have two, and then we're going to add three more. How many do we have? We're building what's called concrete understanding. Physical touching building blocks of a building for understanding addition, where you're doing something the very next step. When you're drawing pictures in a mind, you're doing pictural understanding. So, a lot of times that comes from, you start out with concrete things and then you move to something a little more abstract, and then when they have that in their mind, and they can picture everything they've touched or everything they've drawn, it then begins to come naturally that they start building those things in their mind without any help from the hands-on stuff.

J -

Yes, I've seen that so true. Like with my daughter, I was telling you that who had to draw those pictures at the beginning of the narration, and probably for three years, she did that.

And then one day it was like I don't need to do this anymore. You know, I mean, it's been probably three or four years since she's done that. And now, she narrates just fine, you know. But it was like you said, building that concrete skill. And you see that throughout Charlotte Mason's different subjects. She always starts with the concrete like you were talking about with the math manipulatives. That's how she taught math. You know, they're doing nature study and they're outside and they're observing it and they're touching it, and they're smelling it, and they're feeling it. And then, you know, for later abstract science, but they had that foundation of this concrete, you know? And so, I think we can, it's easy to think about it in terms of math or science, but in terms of listening to a story, we don't think about it, but kids need that kind of concrete too, so I think that's fantastic

C -

Yeah, and even think about them I think they're called Rory's story cubes. That's a very similar premise. They roll some dice, and they have little pictures on them. And they start telling a story from the pictures. And that is just one more method of helping this comprehension. And we already talked about picture study being an amazing way. There's a card game called Picture Rica which actually is great for memory too, but we don't use it the way the directions say. We take the cards. They have these silly, goofy, strange, very strange pictures on them, but depending on the ability of a child we'll lay three, four, eight, ten of those cards out and I have kiddos make a story up in their mind to connect the pictures together. So, let's say it's this goofy lion and then the next card is a spaceship. The story that they're going to make up is Leo the lion hopped on a spaceship. And then the next card might have a table with food on it. And inside the spaceship, he found a table full of wonderful food. And so, it's a stupid story. But it is enough that you can then say close your eyes and you can turn over, depending on the ability of the child and how many cards you have laid out, one card, turn over, four cards, turn over, six cards and say okay, which cards are missing? And so that's comprehension and memory, working memory too, going hand in hand together in something that is just this amazing, it makes changes in the brain. Does it strengthen both of those skills in ways that you're just like how did that happen? A fun little activity, you know?

J -

Right. Well, that reminds me of an activity that's in the scouting curriculum that we recently published that was from one of the books that Charlotte Mason used. But the beginning lesson for scouting is on observation. You have a tray or a collection of nature objects you know? And the kids close their eyes. You take three or four objects away. Okay, what's missing?

C -

Yep, that's it.

J -

Yeah, but it's that same building, those same neural pathways of attention and working memory. And it's a silly little game. You're like, what does this have to do with scouting, right? You want to be successful out in the woods. You have to be able to observe your environment, and so it starts with the very basics there.

C -

Yeah, well, and think about that. You just used the word observe, and you know I'm a big nature study girl, so observation is really and truly to me, another very important executive skill. I don't know if any people who decide if it's an executive functioning skill or not include that, but it is incredibly important in everything our kids will do as they grow older.

In high school classes, in college classes, in life, the ability to be able to observe is one of those, all right, I've paid attention well, I have remembered well, and because we're talking about higher-order thinking skills, I can now make connections between these things because I've been watching closely. So, it all, everything in education really does tie together so beautifully and it's our job just to provide the opportunities in more ways, right?

J -

Right. For sure, yeah. I love that. And I just love how much it ties into that you don't have to redo everything that you're doing in your home, you know? Like the things that you're already doing are helping these skills, but how might we incorporate some games or some activities to kind of boost those? So, talk a little bit about what some of the different kind of brain training games or activities you would do for some of those different cognitive skills.

C -

Sure, so when we, when I did, the brain training for myself, she had mentioned that in her office she will take a child, and it's a six to eight-week program, five days a week for about an hour to an hour and a half. And he said, but they don't need to come back and see me again after that. And she said so when we are doing it that intensely, I always tell the parents, don't you dare go home and expect your kids to do any additional school beyond this. Because if you had to work your body out really, really hard for an hour and a half, you'd be tired. Well, it's the same premise with the brain. So, she said because some of us said, okay, well, we're not doing this at home in that kind of intensive environment. So how can we take that back?

And so, what I took from what she said was habit training. That's, you know what I turned her information back into was I was going to choose something, and we were going to habit train it, and for us, because I had multiple ages at one time, it was, we had always done a morning time practice and we got in a lot of our, the truth, goodness, and beauty kind of stuff in together. And so, we incorporated brain training activities during that time, and we all did them together. We all trained for the same habit, no matter who needed it. Because it's not gonna hurt anybody. So, I would just think all right, well, what is the biggest thing that we need to work on right now? And let's pretend that it was, let's pretend that it was a memory. Well, I would make sure that every single day, five days a week, for at least a full month, we were doing one to two activities, sometimes three, if they were really, really fast, that focused, specifically on memory. The kids had no idea that I had really changed anything. It was just like you know, cause we would play a geography game sometimes or we would have math flashcard war or something like that during that morning time. And so, it was just an additional game or two that we would play. And it fit in beautifully during that time. We were done with it and the coolest part is, you know, as you can imagine like you warm up before exercising, you warm up those muscles. We warmed up our brains in so my kids actually focused better the rest of the school day by starting our school day like that.

And Eli and I, the one I'm still homeschooling, he's an eighth-grader currently. We still do brain training games quite often. Probably not every day anymore, but most mornings we still start off, because I'd still, even though he's eighth grade and it's just me and him, we still have a morning time practice together. Yeah.

J -

I'm the same way even as an adult like if I'm going to sit down and do a lot of work, I have to go for one or I have to like do something that's going to get my brain going because I know I can focus better and I can get more accomplished if I'm in the right state. It doesn't matter how old you are like that just has shown to work. So, I love that you do it during morning time and that's the thing that we do as well. And it's such an easy way to kind of bring something in like that, you know, and something that's going to benefit everybody.

And we really are working that brain muscle, right? And so, I think sometimes we forget how hard our kids are working, how much their little brains are having to do on a regular basis. It is hard work, and especially if they're not kind of used to this style of education where they have to do the work for themselves if it's kind of been passive and everything's just been poured into their little brains, and now you're trying to do a Charlotte Mason education, you're like, I have to think for me and put this thing in my own words, and like that's really hard. But it is like working a muscle, that clearing through the forest, right? Like so once you start working it like you're saying with these activities, I just kind of think of like, yeah, clearing through the forest. Once you kind of make the path then it's easier to keep going on it, right? And so, these activities are kind of prepping their minds for the rest of this work that they're going to do the rest of the day with their brain.

C -

Absolutely.

J -

Yeah, that's great. That's so good. So, can you give me an example of what one of those activities might look like?

C -

Sure, let's see. I'm going to try to think of one that covers a lot of things. The game, oh, this is an easy game. Many of you probably have it in your closet. It's a game you might have even bought for your preschoolers. It's called Spot It.

J -

Oh my gosh, we love Spot It.

C -

So, preschoolers can play this as well as any age all the way through to adulthood. And so if you're not familiar, little round cards, little discs. They have pictures on them, and so there's this pile of these little round cards in the middle and everyone who's playing has a card sitting in front of them. And so, your job is to look at the pictures on your card and try to be the first person to find a matching picture from your card to the one in the middle.

And if you are the one who guesses that you grab the card from the middle, and it becomes your new card. And of course, now there's a new card in the middle. So, what that's doing is, remember the attention where I was saying all kinds of things coming in.

There are so many little colorful pictures, they're different sizes. Your mind has to really sort through quickly with focused attention to try to be the first person to figure out if you have the matching picture. And then there's a lot of memory involved because your eyes are back and forth between these cards. And so that's working memory in and of itself.

But then the card is constantly changing, so either you're getting a new card in front of you, or a new card with new pictures is showing up in the middle. And so, you constantly have to re-shift the attention and the memory in order to be able to win this game. So, it can be a challenging game.

J -

Yeah, my kids beat me pretty much every time.

C -

My kids beat me most of the time too. If you have one who is super-duper struggling and they never win, I would say start playing it with them by themselves for a little bit. And that could literally mean just them by themselves looking at cards and learning the process of how they need to think. Or you or maybe another sibling who's not quite so competitive working with them and not allowing them to be the loser all the time, you know. Just because you want them to feel successful and to understand how does my mind need to think to process this? And you will watch them improve.

Another activity that's very very simple and can even strengthen, let's see, it's going to strengthen your attention. It's going to strengthen your working memory. It's gonna, both of those actually. Spot It too, processing speed. Visual processing speed is what we're talking about here. Comprehension just in the fact that you have to know what you're looking at in both of these. Logical reasoning, not for either of these. But there's a card game called Blink. And Blink like you would blink your eyes. And if you've seen the game Set, it's very similar except different. So, each card has a shape, a color, and a number of things on it. So, it might have one red triangle on it, or it might have two green flowers, or it might have three blue raindrops. I'm forgetting what's on the cards right now. So, depending on the ability, here's how I would start that. We don't, you could play it the way that the directions say, and that would be a good brain training game, but this is to specifically help those kiddos who need to work on any one of those three main things.

Processing, memory, attention, speed them up so maybe they're a little more competitive with their siblings.

So, you look at them and you say, okay, I'm going to put one card in front of you at a time and we're going to put the timer on and all I want you to do is tell me the color that you see, okay? And so, you go through the deck and they're saying green, red, green, green, whatever the colors are, and your goal is to do that maybe five days in a row and tell them oh my word, every single day, look at this. You got faster with that. That was amazing. Now this next week, guess what we're going to do? I'm gonna change the game on you. You have to tell me the color and then when I put the next one down you have to tell me a number. Okay, so it might be Red two, green three, and now when they're all a sudden their timer is going to be shot and they're going to take double or triple the time they took last week. That's okay because your mind had to switch back and forth between two things. But we're going to do this for a whole week and let's see if you can improve on it.

And so, you will see drastic improvements. And so, then you just kind of keep changing the game on them. The next week you say okay, if they're, like if they weren't super great the second week at the two things you say, okay, we're going to reverse that. Now I want you to do, or not reverse it. Let's just change it up a little bit. I want you to tell me color and shape, color and shape, color and shape, and then eventually you get to all three of them.

Color, number, shape, color, number, shape, and then the next day you change it, and you say number, shape, color, number, shape, color. And so, what you're doing is this incredibly productive one to two minutes. I mean, it literally does not take that long where you are training those three skills in so big and so hard that they'll go back to the Spot It that maybe they weren't super great at and you're going to be like okay, you just smoked everybody.

J -

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I should practice that game first.

C -

I do that at conferences. I'll usually...

I'll usually have a teenager that's sitting in the room come up and I'll say, okay, I'm going to show you how to do this. You put the cards in front of me and so I will show them how to do it. And then I start taking the cards in front of them and they smoke me every single time, their first time ever playing it.

J -

Oh, I just love that. And I love it's like it's so powerful with a short amount of time.

C –

Oh yes.

J -

And it's not like you're investing huge blocks of your time. What about in terms of like a parent that's like well, we can't really afford to buy something right now. Is there something that they could do that simple with things they might have at home?

C -

Well, sure. Well, you gave an amazing example. And it wouldn't even have to be nature items, but anything that has to do with memory games. Whether you find things around the house to put on a tray and then cover the tray, and they have to remember. Picture study. What is that you can get online and find artwork to do that with. Just memory games that you might have in general or even a printable. So, we play a bird memory game. Like, the actual memory, you know, where all the cards are turned over. That is a brain training activity. But there's a fun one. It's called visual tic tac toe. I'm not sure if that's exactly what it's called, but that's what I call it, where you have everyone picture, to begin with, you would physically draw a tic tac toe board, maybe on a whiteboard or on a piece of paper, and so everybody kind of sees that up. But the tic tac toe game between two people is done visually.

So, it could be done with people walking up to that whiteboard and with their fingers, kind of physically touching the board at first, but nothing shows up. So, everybody who's part of the game has to remember, that's where that X was, right? And then if you want to take it into a comprehension level, more so, people can only use words. I'm placing an X in the top left-hand corner, so we're getting directional words and things too, for kids who struggle with some comprehension of those. And so, I mean it's hard.

J -

I was going to say I would probably have to cheat and write it on a piece of paper.

C -

When you start out with the physical touch to the board or the piece of paper that doesn't have the Xs or Os, but you're actually making them and touching that border paper, it's a whole lot easier to remember. So, it's again that next step. It's that first step of building some concreteness of that concept before you completely strip that away and everything has to happen in the abstract.

J -

Yeah, that's a great point. What about in terms of like movement? Do you incorporate that into any of the games or like the, I think I saw some of the movement YouTube video that you had linked to, or YouTube channel?

C -

The brain training that I went to, she gave us a YouTube channel and you will have to go on my website to remember what it's called.

J -

I can put it in the show notes.

C -

Put it in the show notes?

J -

Got it, yeah.

C -

Okay. What if? What if 22, maybe...you'll put it in the show notes. Anyway, this lady has eight different videos of executive functioning exercises, and so the premise behind some of this is that some children you will notice if they were C sectioned or they never quite crawled and went straight to walking or they were perhaps not able in Charlotte Mason homes, this likely isn't a problem, but you know, maybe you have a kiddo who came into your family who didn't have the chance early on to climb trees and to do what we call crossover. So right-left crossover. Crossing the midline. Anytime your right crosses over to your left or vice versa, you're crossing the midline. A lot of your dyslexic kiddos and your dysgraphia kiddos really need some practice, some exercises, where the body practices crossing the midline and it actually does some more of that integration of the left and right side of the brain.

So, this lady has specific exercises. We did them when we first started this, probably for two or three months, and then we slowly let those go away. But they're good exercises anyway to start in the morning with so picture the Superman I think is what it's called.

You're on your hands and knees and your right arm goes out and your left leg goes back and you kind of hold that for 20 seconds, and then you switch.

J -

I mean, I do that at orange theory so.

C -

Yeah, so... ??? Yeah, so you, and so some of them will be like the old aerobics activity.

Lifting your knee up and you're touching on the, crossing the midline kinds of activities.

And there's also a ton of research for your ADD, ADHD kids that they need large muscle stimulation. So, on a daily basis to get their thighs, their butt, their stomach muscles, even their big arm muscles working and moving. I don't know if it has to do with oxygenation.

I'm not really sure the research behind it, but there's a ton of research that says those large body movements help. Even as simple as, go walk up and down a flight of stairs three times. Or you need some fresh air and I need a break. Go run. Run around the house four times. And you've stimulated those large muscles and some of those kiddos can easily come back. Some people will call those brain breaks. I don't really care what you call them, but stimulating that movement is very, very important, especially for your attention kiddos.

J -

Yeah, yeah, that's such a great point. And I love, I had Don Duran come on and talk about Swedish drill a while back and you know, that this was something Charlotte Mason included in her programs and it had all those exercises have a ton of bilateral stimulation, which I'm sure they didn't call it what it was or even thought about it. But they worked because that's, you know, now we have the research to back it up. But one of the things I do too with my ADHD kiddos is bringing that kind of large movement in with some of the games that you've mentioned. Playing spot it, for example. I might have like an obstacle course or they have to go like, the Spot It cards are on the trampoline and they have to go find the one that matches it and run back to the...

C -

Oh, I love that. That's awesome.

J -

Just even sitting to play the Spot It game is extremely difficult, you know, but if we're running and playing the Spot It at the same time, they can match it so much faster too, so.

C -

And the goal eventually is to make it not so excruciating to sit there. That's definitely like an intermediate wonderful idea, to say you can't sit here and do this right now, so I'm going to change this up to add some movement to it. That's awesome. And really, in some of your other, more practical like, let's say you need to do some math drilling for multiplication for one of these kiddos. Or spelling before a certain, you've noticed that the OUGH words are not sticking very well. Rather than...

J -

Were you watching my house?

C -

Even as simple, so you could do like a million different things. But passing balls back and forth where you take turns to spell the words or parts of the words or jumping to the letters that you're talking about. So, start the word come through so you say TH R and then they have to jump through the obstacle course of OUGH to remember the thing. Or writing it real big on a whiteboard. Again, you're doing some crossing the midline activities. So, you can even think in terms of, I've got this kiddo, who needs some large muscle stimulation. We need to cross that midline. They're having a hard time sitting still for a game that they really should be able to sit still for. How can I not make my day longer? So, then I do some of the stuff that we were already going to do today.

J -

Yeah, I'm all about combining them, that is so good. And I love that in terms of spelling too, I think of how she taught them how to spell, which was through copy work but picturing the word in their mind. That working memory and that...

C -

The comprehension of it.

J -

Yeah, yeah. Then you picture this in your mind and like with picture study, why am I doing that? Well, if you want them to be able to picture this word in their mind, having that skill where they could picture okay, that boy was wearing a red coat and had this thing, it's that skill, right?

C -

Well, think about it this way. So, when we have, we have short-term files in our brain, like little file cabinets and we have long-term files. If we can pull the picture into the mind and we have the picture there, it is far more likely to get filed in the long-term memory than just tossed out. And so, I mean, that's the whole premise of building the comprehension in the brain because once it's pictured, it's so much harder to let go of. And we think about that in terms of telling our kiddos, be careful what you look at because you can't get it out of your mind right? So, we wanna put those things in front of them as pictures in their mind as often as possible. And a simple activity like jumping through the OUGH. Every single time they struggle with one of those words, they're going to picture the jumping through that little obstacle course. So, it's a picture that's forever there.

J -

Yeah, yeah. For sure. That helps me as well. Like to be able to remember stuff, I have to picture in my head too, or someone name if I'm meeting them for the first time. I'm like, I'm gonna forget their name.

C -

I still do that.

J -

And study their face, and say three times. I mean it's really a life skill that they're gonna have a really long time. Well, in closing, do you have any final tips for parents or encouragement for someone who might be wanting to check this out?

C -

Yeah, well, I've got a lot of resources over at Our Journey Westward. It's just kind of an overview understanding to be reminded of all these executive functioning skills and some very basic games that will cover a lot of them. And then there are two specific posts that are linked to the main one. I think you're going to link these...that have a bunch of different games that specifically focus on visual processing, which is, again, that's going to cover all kinds of the executive functioning skills, but particularly focusing on what comes in through the eyes. And then another one that has games and things that particularly go through the ears. When I say games, it's not necessarily things that you have to buy games. There are suggestions for like, the Tic Tac Toe and that kind of stuff, they're all there too.

The only other thing I would say is just like any other habit is a process. Now, if you've got the habit of teaching a kiddo to make a bed, you've got to teach them how to make the bed well and you have to make sure that that is a habit that is practiced regularly and you're not off the hook, right? I mean, that's one of the things that Charlotte Mason really taught me if there was anything else about habits, is that, if I don't take the time to seriously train these things, it's going to be a pain to do it. It's going to be a bigger pain if I only halfway do it and I have to do it again and I have to do it again. So, take the pains in the efforts to really put any habit training into place. But when you're thinking about brain training, it is something that needs to happen on a regular basis.

J -

That's a really good point. Yeah, the consistency of it. Yeah.

C -

So just, your morning time practice, have, you could almost have a little set of games that you just loop through and you say every morning we're pulling out one or two of these if they only take two or three minutes apiece, will point out one or two of these, and that's part of what we do. And then we throw those one or two back in you know the back of the little set that we have and the next day we just grab the next. So, you don't have to think really, really hard about it, once you have your little plan in place, but doing it every day, you're going to start seeing changes that all of a sudden, you're going to be like, I gave them directions to do four things for chores and they were done. You're going to notice it.

I also have a brain training master class over at Our Journey Westward, where I kind of talk through some of this too. So, if you want another, another visual with probably a little bit more, I don't remember how technical we got. There were definitely some more game suggestions and things in that. So those are all available to you.

J -

Okay. Okay, yeah, that's great. That's perfect. That's a great way to kind of jump in and get started. And I always ask people if they have a favorite Charlotte Mason quote or a quote that relates to what we're talking about.

C -

Well, I cannot. Let's see, I can pull it up really quickly. ??? Yeah, actually, no, I have it right here. That comes from volume one, and I believe it's page 136 and it has, it's exactly what I was telling you before. The mother, who takes pains to endow her children with good habits, secures for herself smooth and easy days, while she who lets their habits take care of themselves, has a weary life of endless friction with the children.

J -

Yep.

C -

It's the same principle we're talking about. ???

J -

We're making habits whether we know we're making them or not, and we either make bad ones or we can be intentional about sewing good ones. And I think, I mean the first habit that she talked about was attention. And there's a reason for that, but that's the foundation that's going to help make those smooth and easy days, and like you were saying, you can focus on the habit of making the bed. But if their attention and working memory is poor, you're going to feel like you're banging your head against the wall to get them to learn to make the bed.

C -

Absolutely. And let me do mention really quickly. We found that food and drink played a role. So, if you have someone who, even with some brain training you're like, you know your eyes are still popping out of your head. Do some research on some potential nutrition. It made a large difference for us too.

J -

Yeah, yeah, that's a really great point too, that like yeah, and it might be that, you know like you were saying like it's a process. It's building this muscle. So don't get discouraged when some kids might take longer to build that habit than other kids. Yeah.

C -

Oh, for sure.

J -

Yeah, yeah. And that can be hard. It's not an instant fix, right? There's no such thing.

C -

Well, there's nothing that says that a habit only takes 21 days or only takes 28 days, right? People have said you've gotta do it for 21 days or you have to do it for 28 days, but with something that we, it's really difficult for us, especially when we have it down, and then we slip back into the bad habit that we had already, you know, gotten pretty comfortable with.

It can take longer, and it's the same with our kids. But we are giving them a blessing by starting early by building good habits. Habit upon habit upon habit. And you can work on more than one at a time. Don't try to work on too many, it's going to frustrate you and them, but you'll turn around in a couple of years and you'll just be like, we've made a ton of progress and it's going to be such a blessing for you to see. And for them. They'll have good habits.

J -

And I love your approach to it too because it's fun. It's not like oh we are going to learn the habit of attention and everybody sit down and we're going, you know, like we can make this like a super stressful thing that we have to focus on, rather this is a very playful way to accomplish that same purpose. And I love that. And so, the kids even know they're working on it.

C -

You have no idea. It's just a fun morning time game, right?

J -

These games we're playing now. I love this. So, it's such a great approach. And how can people connect with you if they want to find out why? I know you mentioned...

C -

Yeah, Our Journey Westward pretty much across all the social media platforms. I am most active on Instagram, so I love Instagram. It's a happy place to be. Happier than most other places.

J -

A hundred percent. All right, well thank you so much, Cindy, for taking the time to talk to us today.

C -

Sure. Thanks for having me.

J -

Thank you for joining us today on the Charlotte Mason Show. I'm your host, Julie Ross, and I would love to meet you in person. All of the Great Homeschool Conventions have been rescheduled to 2021. Go to greathomeschoolconventions.com to find a convention near you.

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