Children at Steiner preschools are always immersed in the activities of shoveling sand, rolling or tying wool ropes, stacking wooden blocks, folding fabric, watering plants, etc. Do children learn anything or develop anything from these activities? This simple?
The article below will clearly state the relationship between fine motor movements and the brain and the benefits of fine motor movements from research results in preschool and elementary schools.
Article written by Sebastian Suggate - Professor of Developmental Psychology and Early Childhood Education at Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences, published in December 2014, at Erziehungskunst, Waldorf Education Today Magazine http ://www.erziehungskunst.de.
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👐Fine motor skills and sharp thinking. Findings from kindergarten and elementary schools. (Part 1)
Both the radical pedagogue Maria Montessori and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger viewed the hand as an instrument of intelligence. This ideology believes that movement is essential for thinking. And in Rudolf Steiner's education, this ideology also played an important role. Many recent experimental findings have also corroborated this extremely interesting idea.
One of the first achievements of young children involves neuromotor development. From the moment the baby's body develops a little and has strength, sometimes as early as the 5th month of pregnancy, pregnant mothers notice small movements that are often felt like butterflies in the stomach. Mom.
Even from birth, newborn babies have so-called basic reflexes that have been suppressed during development. For example, newborn babies have the strength to hold their body weight when held with both hands. Or right after birth, it seems like your baby can swim in water (swimming reflex). But these basic reflexes or survival reflexes are lost soon after birth.
Although the emergence of these basic reflexes is important, the first real achievement seems to be the reflexes that are repressed during development. At dinner, when they drop the spoon and let the food fall to the ground, children do so not because they want to make their parents angry, but ultimately, for another reason: when doing this action, the child Learn to inhibit your grasping reflex. Therefore, from the beginning, cognitive control processes are closely related to neuromotor development.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that findings in the field of experimental psychology as well as brain research suggest that finger and manual dexterity (i.e. motor skills) crystal) and activity in thinking play a significant role.
🖐️The resonance between thinking and action
In adults there is something called motor resonance. This means that thinking comes faster if a compatible action occurs at the same time. For example, if we tell adults the following statement “Open the door, John” and then let them judge whether it is a meaningful sentence or not, then that judgment comes quite quickly if they turn the doorknob counterclockwise when they hear this statement. But if those subjects turned the doorknob clockwise when they heard this sentence, the thinking process happened more slowly. Because we usually open the bottle in a counterclockwise direction, there was a resonance between the action and understanding the meaning of the above statement in this experiment. In other words, the resonance between thought and action increases the speed of thinking. In long-term research projects in developmental psychology, specifically from the United States, we have very interesting findings. These findings suggest a pattern that preschool-age children with superior fine motor skills are better at math and do better on intelligence tests in elementary school.
Translator: Thai Nguyen Hong Nhung
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