Friday, July 29, 2011

Using BrainGym in the Classroom

My previous experience as a Teacher in both the primary and secondary schools, teaching students with learning difficulties, had spurred me to look for alternative methods of tackling challenges faced by students in achieving their potential. I had experimented with some techniques where pen and paper fail to help these students. BrainGym was one of the methods which I come across in 2006. At that moment, I was still teaching in a government school. I watched as my niece and  nephews went for their BrainGym classes and wondered what they were doing. I was a skeptic until I myself experience BrainGym, when I observed one of the classes. I read further on this topic and decided to go for the BrainGym 101 workshop, at my own expense. From that day onwards, I never looked back.
Since then, I had been practicing BrainGym in my classroom. Implementing it definitely needs a lot of patience as my pupils are not used to doing the exercises. However, during the final year examinations, a few of my kind of hyper students did the 'hook-ups' himself before and after he finished his paper. It was a happy moment for me, although he never said it out openly but what he did  showed me that the particular movement helped him to calm down. To implement BrainGym movements need the teacher to be creative and patient in handling students who are not open to the idea yet. But doing it daily would prove to be beneficial for the teacher and student alike.

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