Early Learning and Brain Development, Part I

Dr. Jill Stamm, PhD - New Directions Institute for Brain Development & Professor at ASU

While we have listened to quite a bit over the years in brain development with many thanks to ELF, Family Place, Brazleton, and now ELF 2.0 I wanted to see what was happening in the museum world on this front.

Overall impression - we're on the same track. We have some things they don't and vice versa. Much of the information we had already (some new pieces added), but there were some great new things.

Dr. Stamm is a professor of learning, her daughter a neuro scientist, and together they wrote a book "Bright Start" or something similar to that, she formed a company, and has created a for sale training and program element (patented brain time).

This post will be split into two blog posts as they were two sessions.

Session I meant to give background on the brain, the why and session II geared for information on brain time.

Notes:

- Start by taking brain information to people who nothing about it, business community to get financial backing
- Brain research really took off with Clinton neuroscience conference
- Goals of this knowledge - better training for those who are caring for children, spread the word and help change culture and society
- Understand how the babies brain develops, understand how to stimulate and support that development
- Once understand, brain time box tie in
- the brain develops: back to front (occipital lobe - vision in the back of the brain first)
- dyslexia is actually an auditory disorder and requires a listening treatment
- intellectual capacity is not fixed at birth
- We do come wired at 25% at birth, 75% wired at one year, an 90% by three years
- Watch same video footage as family place from tv special on neglected babies who for two years received almost no human interaction laying in cribs for two years in Romania.
- View brain scans of children and see deficits
- earlier brain wired, more difficult to change (keep resiliency for children with good brain experience, harder for children with bad experience)
- Brain / yarn demonstration showing wiring
- Talk, sing, read, write, play with children
A,B,C - attention, bonding, communication with children is how they learn / wire
- Connection between amount of words spoken in household and IQ
- Marshmallow video clip about impulse control, will power and how this contributes to child brain development an how important a reliable adult is to a child
- S.T.E.P.S. of child development = security, touch, eyes, play, sound
- new development = mirror neurons
- neurons fire by watching someone
- children with autism cannot learn by watching, do not have empathy, or eye cntact