I Heart Glenn Doman

This weekend I was a little... Well, shall we say peeved at the fact that we had a course at work which meant having to stay until 8.30pm on Friday and from 9am until 7pm on Saturday (It was originally supposed to be 6pm but overran by an hour!)

I´m not saying I was very happy at being at work half the weekend, in fact I was definitely NOT happy about it, but in the end the course was very interesting (although intense!)

I work, as a teaching assistant in a private bilingual school in Madrid, my class is a class of 18 three year olds and in three years old, we teach everything in English. The course in question was Early Stimulation (which lazily i´ve translated directly from "estimulación temporal", but probably has another name in Enlgish)

So as I sat down at 5.30pm on Friday, after having been working since 8am that morning, I was ready to be bored and even more peeved, but when the teacher started talking about Glenn Doman and his methods on teaching babies and young children, using a range of exercises to develop the body and flash cards to develop the mind, I started to pay attention. This was interesting!

Glenn Doman was a physical therapist who founded, in 1955 The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential (Sounds like something out of X-Men right?!) Well, this was originally a non-profit organisation to help children with brain damage, to develop their full potential as the name suggests, using the exercises and flash cards to develop their brains and bodies as much as possible, rather than just leaving them to a life stuck in a wheelchair or a hospital bed unstimulated.

In the 1960´s they began to use the methods on children with no disabilities aswell and the results were pretty amazing!

All over the world centres are using the Glenn Doman methods to develop the minds and bodies of children to their fullest, training teachers, schools and parents in how to develop the minds of children everywhere.

Unfortunately a lot of the exercises have to be done between birth and two years to awaken the areas of the brain, such as exposure to language and my children are three and four years old. We can teach them languages, of course, they are learning English and doing an amazing job I might say! Also I only started to learn Spanish almost two years ago and since a year ago, outside of work I only speak Spanish.

However, there is a point in a childs life (at around six months) when the brain stops being able to distinguish the sounds from different languages which makes pronounciation so difficult when learning a language later in life, which is why Spanish people have difficulties pronouncing English words begining with an S, followed by a consonant, because these words don´t exist in Spanish, they always have an E at the begining, like Spanish in Spanish is Español and Spain is España. Also it´s difficult for English people to pronunce the letters J and G in Spanish which have a very throaty sound which doesn´t exist in English, but from zero to six months, the brain is able to learn all the sounds, which is why it´s the best time for language esposure, not necessarily to learn other languores but to develop that part of the brain to its fullest.

I am dying to use my new found knowledge, and yes, of course there are some of the methods that we can use in the classroom, such as crawling, which sounds a bit daft but is very important in a childs development, but until me and Mr. Millennial decide to have baby millennials i´ll just have to wait for the rest!!