Mary’s School Blog

This is an excerpt from a recent Newsweek artcle on brain-based research and how it relates to learning and education. It supports how the Montessori classroom teaches both letters (with sounds) and math (with an emphasis on quantity)- Mary

Petitto, for instance, led a 2007 study that settled a decades-long debate over how children learn to spell: does the brain uses the same processes for words you can sound out (”blink”) as for those you can’t (”yacht”)? Brain imaging showed that blink-like words use the brain’s sound-processing system, while yacht-like words rely on circuits that encode memory and meaning. That suggests “a dual-route model of spelling,” Petitto says. “Knowing this, there’s no way I’d teach a child spelling without phonological information. This is finally evidence that the brain needs that and uses it.”
The new journal, called Mind, Brain, and Education, is full of other fascinating hints. One study found that when children begin forming mental representations of letters, more than the visual sense comes into play. Crucially, the brain’s premotor area, which plans movements, does. That suggests that having children try to write letters at the same time that they’re learning to recognize them might produce what Denes Szucs and Usha Goswami of the University of Cambridge call “a multisensory representation” of letters, and “deepen learning.”
Another study found that the brain’s representations of numerical magnitude and of physical size overlap, sharing networks of neurons, so that the same circuit that assesses whether 3 is greater than 5 also assesses whether a watermelon is bigger than a grape. Scientists have found a strong link between preschoolers’ mental representations of numbers and how well they do in school. That suggests that strengthening this circuitry by challenging it with grape-watermelon exercises, long before a child takes math, might bolster this fundamental arithmetic network. Neuroscience also shows that children build up their concept of numbers linearly, through a mental number line. Reinforcing that linear image—Chutes and Ladders, anyone?—might strengthen children’s early number sense.