Another Aid in Helping Us Learn Easier and More Effectively

Are you right-handed? Left-handed? Are you right-brained? Left-brained? We all know if we are right-handed or left-handed. Many of us have also heard about left-brained or right-brained. What we may not know is that we also have a dominate foot, ear, and eye and that this information can help us to learn easier and/or better. Last week I took a Brain Gym class to learn more about this and how it impacts our learning.

One of the first things we did in class was to determine our personal unique learning style, based on the side of the brain, eye, ear, hand, and foot that is dominant for us. I found that I am "mixed". My dominate brain side is the right side (No surprise there!) with my dominate hand and ear being right also. However, my dominate eye and foot are on the left side. That gave me the appropriately named learning stye as "mixed". You may be thinking, : "Is that good?", "Is it bad?", "What does that mean?" It is like so many things about us. It is neither. However, having this information can give us insight about the way we learn and react to things.
Because each of us is unique, we do and see similar things differently. How often have we watched people load a dishwasher differently than we do, start to draw a picture in a different way than we would, or even put a picture puzzle together differently! As we learn more about our unique learning style, we are better equipped to learn. Some of the exciting things I learned in this class were: how we can learn to help children who struggle to learn more easily; that if we struggle, it doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with us, but it is just that we learn differently; and how movement, in this case using Brain Gym Activities, can help to access the whole brain resulting in more effective and easier learning;