Little Dreamers - The Film

About the Movie

'Little Dreamer' is a movie that does three things :

• It demonstrates techniques used to enhance learning skills in children. If you feel that your youngster needs to sharpen his/her spelling skills or written expression or math skills… you will learn how to do that here and at the same time, make learning interesting and fun for your child.
• The film emphasizes the development of thinking skills. Some techniques demonstrated here, indirectly polishes thinking skills while sharpening other areas of learning. Yet others are exercises directly targeting the development of thinking skills.
• The third aspect of this movie is the emphasis on controlled movement and it’s importance on the intellectual development of the student.

Why 'Thinking Skills'?

'Intelligence' is the potential but 'Thinking Skills' is the driver and like any other skill, it needs to be sharpened.

In this age of information, thinking skills are very crucial to people in order to enable them to cope with a world that is rapidly changing. Many educators believe that specific knowledge will no longer be as important to the citizens of tomorrow (or perhaps today!) as the ability to make sense of new information and the ability to utilize it effectively.

We are living in times of exponential increase in information. 200 billion emails are sent around the world everyday. A week's worth of New York Times is estimated to contain more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime, in the 18th century.

The amount of video that has been uploaded to YouTube in the last two months is more than the content that would have been aired by ABC, NBC and CBS, if they had been doing so 24/7/365, since 1948, when ABC made it’s first broadcast.

Today, when a student secures admission to a degree course or technical 4-year course, what is studied in the first year is probably outdated by the time the student reaches the third year.

It is believed that the top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 are jobs that did not even exist in 2004.

That means we have been preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist…. using technologies that haven’t been invented yet…in order to solve problems that we don’t even know are problems yet!

How then, do we equip the children of today to deal with the world of tomorrow? The only answer is…by teaching them how to think!

Credits : Karl Fisch, 'Did You Know/Shift Happens'.

Controlled Movement and its Effect on the Intellect.

Young children learn through movement. In fact, almost all behaviour involves movement. Children need to move to understand themselves, their bodies, experience the environment and figure out the relationship between the two.

A child may dig her hands deep into a pile of sand, curl her fingers around whatever she can hold and then raise her hands and let the sand stream out from it as she watches the wind disperse the falling sand. This experience teaches her about the texture and weight of the sand, it tells her that the wind is strong enough to blow the sand around and the grains are so small that the sand slips through her fingers.

She also learns exactly how tightly she has to press her fingers together so that the sand stays in her fists, long enough for her to lift her hands up, in front of her face from where she releases it.

In executing a movement, however simple, there is a lot of planning that happens in the brain. Since this occurs so fast, one is not even aware of it. The task of rising from a chair to stand on the feet, simple, as it may seem, requires a complex, well-organized sequence of ideation, planning and action. Not only does the brain have to figure out which muscles to contract and which muscles to relax, it also has to estimate the effort needed to push the body into a standing position and convey a sense of body boundary so that the person knows where the floor/chair ends and the body starts. Executing something so complex can fall prey to many pitfalls. On the other hand, executing such actions, simple or complex can stimulate the brain wonderfully simply because movement involves such a lot of brain activity.

The child easily retains any concept learnt through active involvement. To understand the concepts of positions: above, below, before, after, through, around, the learner must experience these positions at a jungle gym or a table or slide. Children naturally want to explore new objects in this manner and they need to be allowed to do so.

Rhythm is a very useful teaching aid because it involves an instinctive moving of the body or body part (like the tapping of the foot or fingers) and it helps the learner find the rhythm necessary for reading and writing. We often see children gently rocking their bodies as they read aloud or murmur rhythmically under their breath as they are writing.

Again rhythm helps the child in understanding the cadence and the tempo of a song or poem, thus helping the child to understand time periods and intervals between verses/lines/words.

Action words like run, walk, shuffle, stoop, stomp, skip - are well understood when the word is associated with an action. The word takes on a literal meaning.

Movement also involves the crossing of the body midline (as in tying shoelaces) and this kind of an action involves both the left and right hemispheres. This in turn prompts communication between hemispheres through the connecting area, the corpus callosum. This kind of integration is so necessary to read and write.

When children play games, they have the opportunity to communicate between themselves. Team games generate an understanding of one another’s strengths and weaknesses and compensating strategies. Whenever children learn in one area, it has a positive effect on other areas of development.

Confucius is supposed to have said, "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."

That, in a nutshell, sums it all, for movement!