Remember your childhood phone number? If you are over 30 you probably do. At the time Bell Telephone decided upon that 7-digit number (later requiring the area code as we began calling across the country) research about memorization found that a string of seven numbers is the brain’s capacity for mastery. Chunking those seven numbers into 3s and 4s made it even simpler. This concept of chunking is still a worthwhile tool for memorization of necessary information. When we group larger bodies of information into bite-sized pieces the task of memorization becomes easier.

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Oxygen flows through the body via our heart and blood so it should make logical sense that exercise would be good for learning since the brain is an organ tied to our oxygen supply system. However, educators often lose sight of the benefits of exercise in response to the pressures of more academic rigor and expectations. Recent studies by researchers at Dartmouth University support what we already should know—that exercise prior to mental work increases brain activity and neural pathways. This brain development is especially important during the pre-adolescent and adolescent years when brain growth is so rapid.

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Educational practice is the result of educational research filtered through educational philosophy. The prevailing educational philosophy for much of the last century and the beginning of the 21st has been child-centered. This philosophy has had some tremendously beneficial effects, but with every pendulum swing comes some negative side effects. One such side effect of child-centered education has been our movement away from phonics instruction in favor of whole language, or whole word learning rather than phoneme learning. “Whole word” reading instruction has been given a number of different titles, but the result is the same: phonics has been given a back seat position. The reasons for this shift are too many to address on one page, but I will provide a brief explanation of my own experience as a child development major and credentialed teacher.

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Recent research in brain development and function provides parents and educators with significant insight into strategies that support learning as children develop. Some of these findings support theories as old as the art of parenting. We have always known, but sometimes reject in favor of mass education, that young children need experiences with concrete objects, ideas, and movements in order to thrive. Similarly, nearly every culture has a transition from childhood into adulthood near the age of 13. Now, however, researchers are actually able to look at the neurological evidence for this experienced phenomenon. 

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