Chapter 7 - The vital years

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The vital years	237

key part of early schooling. There they are encouraged to carry out a simple series of routines: spinning, rope jumping, balancing, somersaulting, rolling and walking on balance beams. In the playground, they are encouraged to swing on low "jungle gyms", climb, skate, perform somersaults and flips. And in classrooms they play with a wide range of games, also designed to stimulate their sense of sight, hearing and touch. All activities are designed to increase in skill-level during the year, and thus help stimulate ever-increasing brain development.
  At the end of each year, many of the children undergo the Metropolitan Readiness Test to measure whether they've developed enough to start first-grade schooling. Nearly all have passed the tests in the top ten percent for the state - and most have been in the top five percent. Nearly all of them come from working-class backgrounds.
  Palmer, a former president of the Society for Accelerative Learning and Teaching, emphasizes that the children are not simply walking, running and skipping - the normal "motor" activities. "The stimulation activities we recommend," he says, "are specifically designed to activate the areas of the brain we know will promote their sense of sight, touch and hearing - as well as their ability to take in knowledge."11
  Most parents, for instance, seem to learn instinctively that infants love to be held firmly by their hands and spun around like a helicopter blade. Palmer's Minneapolis public school research at New Vision School has shown that such activities result in important brain growth. And the greater the intensity of the activity the greater you see the results of the brain-growth in areas that are receptive to further learning.
  The overall result is a big gain in competence and self-confidence, increased attention, faster responses and the ability to tackle learning activities of increasing complexity.
  Palmer stresses that the activities are not what many schools would regard as "academic." But any classroom visit shows the youngsters "exploding" into true learning. Early reading is taught with word-card games. The youngsters get an early introduction to mathematics by playing with dominoes and big cards with dots instead of numbers. And they play games to develop pre-writing skills.
  Does it help "academic development"? You bet! In another study of at-risk youngsters who were not doing well at school, Palmer's methods produced dramatic gains in reading ability. The children of the experimental group read three to ten times faster than the control group.12

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