Focus on Early Childhood

by Barbara A. Moir, M. Ed.

Does anyone remember the "old" days when one of the requirements for children to pass kindergarten was being able to demonstrate the ability to tie shoe laces? We didn't say "Tie your shoe laces."  We said "Tie your shoes!"  Today, kids wear "slip-ons." 

The disappearance of shoe laces isn't the only way we've made learning easier for children (and for the teachers who had to train them). Children no longer have to spend hours learning how to print a certain exact way. For example, I recently watched a young student start drawing a capital "T" from the bottom upward--just the opposite from the method many of us learned. Over the past ten years, I've noticed many children using creative ways to draw letters. And I have to conclude that exactness for drawing letters must have gone out the window.  Same for handwriting. But that also means that the brain's attention to details like the importance of distance and direction has also gone out the window.

Telling time is just as bad because of digital watches. We no longer point to the old round clock on the wall or waste our breath repeating "one hand is the hour hand and the other is the minute hand." Children today can tell the time easily  by looking at their digital watches or digital time on their phones. While the old clock used to teach distance and direction by the movement of the clock's hands, digital time is just digital time--just a number that increases during the day. No distance. No direction,

The same is true for the use of GPS apps for map reading, spell check, and calculators for math. They all replace the tedious chore of figuring out information through distance and direction. 

Life for children has become easier but are kids smarter today? The National Report Card shows that fifty percent of eighth graders in inner cities are not on reading level and therefore are not equipped to go into high school.

Why? Because students lack spatial intelligence skills that were once taught through manual operations. One of the main principles of spatial intelligence is the ability to recognize objects according to shape, distance, and direction--according to the book "Frames of Mind, the Theory of Multiple Intelligences," published in 1983, written by Harvard professor Howard Gardner.

Because it is doubtful we will return to shoe laces, round clocks, or paper maps, we need a viable plan to replace the old subjects with something that trains spatial intelligence skills in lower grades.

Luckily we do have that solution--standard music notation. Reading music trains two different types of spatial intelligence that are vital in every subject where a child has to use their eyes. And it trains advanced eye-motion skills, as well.  

That is why I have designed a 5-year plan for reading music from Pre-K through 3rd grade. The plan uses age-appropriate lessons that are short and easily inserted in the present general music curriculum. This plan is fully described in my book The Neuroscience of Reading Music, Optimal Brain Development in Children Using Standard Notation.  The book will become available next Tuesday, October 14th. And for the first two weeks, the publisher has reduced the e-book to $1.99. 

                                                                                   Until next time,    Barbara