We Must Reinsert Movement Into Childhood

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Smart Moves, Why Learning is not All in Your Head is in my top five books that parents and caregivers should read. It is absolutely fascinating and it is changing. Purchase your copy here.

Ginny: Welcome, welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast, my name is Ginny Yurich, the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I tell you what, man, I'm having these guests that I never, ever dreamed I would talk to.

This is Carla Hannaford. She is the author of Smart Moves: Why Learning Is Not All in Your Head and actually a couple of other books as well. Welcome, Carla.

Carla: Thank you, Ginny.

Ginny: This book change my life, so I just cannot even tell you how thrilled I could not have imagined. I read it in 2018, that someday I'd be sitting across the screen from you. So I so appreciate your time.

Carla: And your idea 1000 Hours. You know, getting kids outside is so important right now. Right now, especially.

Ginny: Yes. And it's so good for the parents, too. It's like a win-win.

So I've got a little bit of your bio here. Carla Hannaford is an award winning author, biologist and educator. She's a she sought after as a lecturer, consultant and workshop leader to 51 countries worldwide. Quoted in more than 1000 journals and books, author of four books, all of which are translated into many languages. Carla, congrats. I mean, you have so many accomplishments here. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and about your family, about your journey, how you ended up writing all these awesome books?

Carla: Well, for one thing, I didn't read till I was 10 and back then because I'm 77 now, it didn't matter so much, it wasn't a big deal.

I would have been special ed because I needed to move. I'm really kinesthetic. And so I have two daughters and my daughter Brie had real problems, the same as I did with picking up reading. And so along the way, I ran into basically the brain gym work. I was in Hawaii teaching at the university there, and I was using Georgie Lassarna Super Learning Work, which is a beat a second music that helps brain waves and so you can learn better in my university classes. And so I was invited to work with Comprehensive Student Alienation Program at an intermediate school there in Kona, where I was teaching and I thought, Great, this is good. I can be with my daughter, who was just going into the intermediate school.

Well, she was mortified I would do this to her, so people never knew that I was her mom. You know, this was a little pilot project that I was going to do for nine weeks and it ended up being four years long in the intermediate school and three years long in the grade school. So the next year, the head of the elementary school asked if I could work with special ED kids in the elementary school. And I thought, Wow, this is a great opportunity because before I started working in the intermediate school, Fran Willard a nurse practitioner said, If you're going to be working with these kids, you need to know brain gym. And she showed me just for activities. That was it. And so when these kids that were having such troubles in the intermediate school came in to see me, I would have them do these activities and it was amazing. And they're all movement, you know, and things that we want to be doing and outside especially is great, but really doing.

So I didn't know what to expect. I had no idea what to expect, I had a beat a second music on in the background and here are these kids coming in and all of a sudden I'm getting teachers coming to me and saying, “What are you doing with Leilani, what are you doing with Miley? When are you doing Sarah? What are you doing with Jesse?”

I said, well, a little cross crawl, walking, rolling the ear lobes, the eyes and the hook ups, and they were astounded because these kids were making such progress in a short time, I mean, a couple of weeks.

And I especially got this one situation with Jesse. And it was funny when they handed me all the files of these 19 CSAP kids to look at. And I didn't have the time. I was a single parent teaching full time at university. I didn't read the files and thank goodness. So I had no preconceived notion about these kids. And they came in. I just took them as they were. And I thought Jesse was older. He was big, he was tall and he seemed older than the others. But I didn't know for sure.

So when the teacher came in and said, “What are you doing with Jesse?” I said “Well, these activities.”

She said, “You don't know about Jesse, do you?”

And I said, “Well, not really. “

He was a kid that had been beaten from the day he was born and he couldn't read, apparently he couldn't I mean. Everybody was afraid of him. He was mean and big, and I didn't know that. So when he came in, I said, “What do you want to do, Jesse?” And he says, “Well, I guess reading. “ And I said, “Well what are you interested in?” And he said, “Motorcycles.” I said, “This is great. I used to have a 650 Norton.”

So we went to the library, we got magazines on motorcycles and we did these activities. And the teacher had come in because he had offered to read in class. And this was like two and a half weeks. I had met with him a couple of times and she was astounded. And from then on, he just sailed. I mean, it was amazing to me. And so I was like, “OK, so what's happening here, what's going on physiologically? “

And I started looking through the literature and there wasn't any, you know, at that time. So this is back in the middle of the 1980s? OK, actually a little earlier. And there was nothing on this, you know? And everything was about the brain and we needed to keep kids quiet, we need to get them sitting down quiet so they weren't distracted and they shouldn't move. They just sit there and learn.

So there wasn't anything there, except that I was in neurophysiology, and I knew that the brain is all wired, according to the cerebellum, the area of the brain that has to do with movement and movement is key. All of these reflexes that babies and children have to go through in order to be able to stand up and and write and see things being able to read all had to do with movement. And so I started really watching what was happening. And that was when I wrote the first edition of Smart Moves, after this that basically four years of working with students and five years and more really seeing for myself how important movement was.

Ginny: It's a foundational piece of literature, I think, you know, in terms of, like you said, that the path is sitting, sitting, sitting, desks, and worksheets.

As a parent, our situation is that when my kids were really small and we had three right in a row, I was just drowning and someone introduced me to the work of Charlotte Mason, who was an educator in the 1800s, an educational philosopher. And she said kids should be outside for four to six hours whenever the weather is tolerable. And I just remember thinking that was an absurd idea. We don't do anything like that. We sit, you know, or we go to a short class. And anyway, we did it one day just to appease a friend. And I thought it was going to be a disaster, but it was a fabulous day for all of us and it changed my life. It brought me to a place of hope with my parenting, but I didn't know any of the research or any of the benefits. Besides, it just helped me pass the day. But within a couple weeks, my kids were thriving.

Like you said, this change is so fast and you just you notice these things as a parent. And your book made it all makes sense to me,.

So let's talk about movement because I think that as a society, we really equate learning with sitting and desks and classrooms and pencils. But what your book taught me, and what I have seen firsthand with my children, is that learning and movement are so related. And that the movement helps our brain function and has these lifelong benefits. So so why don't we talk a little bit about that? I know you talked about the brain gym. Let me read a couple amazing quotes in your book.

You say, “Movement activates the neural wiring throughout the body, making the whole body the instrument of learning, and that movement and sensory experiences are the fertile soil for continual brain development and growth for a lifetime. These experiences cause the brain to constantly transform and unimaginably plastic ways.”

So for parents who may not have heard this or teachers who may not have heard this because I did not know this at all, how are movement and learning related?

Carla: Well, right now, I mean, you can pick up almost any journal saying we all have to move. It's not just children, it's adults and the older folks we have got to move. The brain is the last to get it.

We take in our world through our senses, through our body, through movement. And so we are really suddenly realizing that the top neuroscientists in the world are saying the only way that we actually learn is through hands on sensory input. It's really interesting to our hands. This great tool takes 20 years to fully develop. It's the last organs in the body to fully develop. So our greatest tool, and it's so vital that we be doing hands-on things. Doing things like this (swiping up) on our cell phone doesn't work. It doesn't do it. We need to be out in nature doing this.

The two areas of the brain that are the largest, the motor areas in the sensory area, the hands and the feet. And so again, we need to be barefoot that gives us a lot of information about our world. The hands give this a lot and you know, you see kids and some adults like me, if I see a fabric or something, I need to touch it. We need to touch the world in order to understand it and learn about it and grow in it. I want to talk for a minute about the fact that you went outdoors with your kids as just kind of an experiment.

One of the things that really caught my attention was the Danish school system is a top school system in the world. Per capita, there is more important scientific research is more important art coming out of Denmark than any other culture in the world, and they have a system that the kids are outside. They got it actually from Germany, Friedrich Frobel in the eighteen hundreds said,” You know, kids are getting sick. They need to be outside learning.”

So Germany, for a long time was having kids be outside and then they kind of forgot about it. But Denmark took it on. So did Sweden and Finland and Norway. All of the Scandinavian countries that again are producing very well-educated children.

And so one of the things that happens first of all, is one parent stays home with the child. The first two years, usually the mother, the first year, the father the second. And then when they go back to work, they're given back their jobs. They're paid for being home with their children because they find that then they don't end up in prisons, you know, with drug problems and that sort of thing.

Ginny: It's a long term move.

Carla: It's a long term move. And then when the parents go back to work, the children can go to the forest kindergartens, which is amazing to me. So I was really fortunate I was teaching in Germany. Southern Germany, and I had a day off and I walked into the forest and here are all these children ages two to six out in the forest. I didn't see an adult for a moment. There was a dog. T

hen I saw Patrick and I said, What is this and he said the wald kindergarten? I thought, wild kindergarten and here are kids down in the stream and splashing around. And there's kids that are pulling themselves up on the slope and building houses out of sticks that they found and working, learning to work together cooperatively.

That learning from the forest and each other and the thing about nature, about being outside in nature is that we call the golden mean the Archimedean twist the the structures of the plants. All of the plants, the trees and everything are in a certain mathematical proportion, just like our bodies are.

And so learning those proportions helps us in two things mathematics and language. And those are the things that we test kids on all the time, you know, so being in the forest and learning those early things just in their own bodies, from touch and from understanding it they're getting ready to learn at a higher level, when they do go to school in those Scandinavian countries, they usually don't go to school before the age of six and a half or seven. And that's when the brain is more on for sitting down and learning linear kinds of things. Before that, it's more global. We know that from Maria Montessori and from Rudolf Steiner's work that. You know, our first is global brain and understanding the big picture, and then we can start to put it into pieces. The detail.

Ginny: It's really neat. that you got to see a forest kindergarten. You know, we always hear about them, and it's so unbelievably different than how things are structured here in the states. I used to teach high school math in a in a district around where we live. And the last year I taught, I was an administrator for the math curriculum from kindergarten to 12th grade, and so I got to be in and out of these different classrooms that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. And it was the year that they were ushering in this full day kindergarten. And all he kindergarten teachers said the kids need a play. We have to bring back stations and all of the time went toward academics. And so what an unbelievable difference these forest kindergartens are.

And so you talk about the sensations, right? We get all these sensations from our eyes, our ears, our nose, our tongue, our skin, our proprioceptors, which I want to talk about proprioceptors in a minute. But those are the foundation of knowledge.

But there's a one quote that I tell everybody. I talk at different homeschool conferences and really just anybody I talked to. This is the one I tell them because this was the linchpin for me where I was like, “Oh, I get it.”

You say, “Elderly people who dance regularly decrease their risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease by 76 percent, and those that play a musical instrument decrease their risk by sixty nine percent.”

And you talk about how these playful cross lateral movements they enhance and they protect our brain function. And I read that and I was like, “Oh, this makes sense,” because when I was watching my children and at the time, they were like three, two, and just starting crawling, you know, six months, seven months - they're constantly doing things that challenge themselves. It's self-initiated, right? They jump on that log and then they go higher and then they climb the tree and then they're trying to spin and they're rolling and they all on their own. They do these complex movements.

And so that ‘s what made it make sense to me are that these movements, they help with all the neural wiring. So you talk in your book about myelin. I had watched that movie Lorenzo's Oil when we were kids. So and you brought that up in your in your book, but can we talk about those brain pathways? And because it seems like let me. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Carla: One of the things, tying into what you said ,when I went to the forest kindergartens and I've been through a lot lately and ones here in the United States. And what's interesting is I'm just thinking right now the Swedish one in Stockholm, Sweden, where the kids have to go like a half a mile into the forest. And so as they're walking into the forest, they're not taking the paths. They're climbing the rocks. You know, and my impulse because they're struggling, you know, these are two year olds, two, three, four, up to six. And my impulses to help them and the adult says, “Don't help them.”

They're developing their vestibular system, their balance system, which is absolutely key for learning.

And so they let the children just do what they do. And when the children finally get frustrated, they say, “Help me.” The adults say, “How shall I help you?” So they have to do deductive reasoning saying, “Well put your hand under my foot” or something like that. But the adults do not help the children unless they ask. And then if the child falls and you know, young kids like that, there's a lot of cartilage too much, you know? And usually it's just they've they missed a step. And so what the adults do is they don't run to them. They just stand and they look that they're OK, you know? And then they open their arms and the kids run and they hold them for a minute and then the kids are like, OK, OK. And they go off and play.

But they have to learn. They have to explore. Just like your children were exploring their environment, you know, jumping on the couch, just jumping, you know, on the logs, climbing the logs, climbing the the rocks. There are a lot of schools now that are kind of looking at that and having playgrounds that the children actually help to develop that have logs and streams and rocks and stuff for them to really challenge their system. This is what you were talking about with vestibular system, the proprioception, knowing where they are.

Ginny: Well let's talk about those because those are words I learned from you and I grew up, I remember in school doing worksheets about he five senses and just thinking, these are a waste of my time.

But I remember learning about the five senses and then learning that there were more just within the past couple of years. And so you talk how about the vestibular system is the first one to develop in utero and how spinning and getting the brain out of an upright position activates the vestibular sense. So let's talk about that one first and then I want to talk about the proprioception one, too, because that's like the heavy work. What is the vestibular sense and why is it important for parents to know about it?

Carla: So the vestibular sense starts with the semicircular canals of the inner ear, and they're actually developed by a month after conception, and they have to do with motion sense.

So we're constantly, whenever we move our head, the rest of our body - all of the muscles have different have to contract in order to hold this up, you know? And we learn this through time from the baby. Also about five months, the fifth, the eighth cranial nerve, comes on the vestibular cochlear nerve. And that's when the fetuses, the nerves are starting really to develop throughout the body, and they're getting a sense of sound that doesn't occur until about then. So about 24 weeks or older. And but it's it's the first cranial nerve to develop the vestibular cochlear to give us a sense of balance. And what do we need on this planet? We have gravity, right? So our greatest challenge in our lives is gravity, you know, and how to work with gravity. And so that's the vestibular system assistance in doing that, the motion sense. And proprioception is that sense of where we are and space and and the.

Ginny: And that the proprioception one, you know, I've read about from your books and then in a couple other places that this is like the push and pull on your joints.

What movements do kids do? Well, they do wheelbarrow races, and they hang upside down on monkey bars, and they cartwheel, and they somersault, and they roll down hills, and naturally swing even just on a swing. You know, I remember swinging and you throw your head back and all of these different things that kids intrinsically do on their own, even even in the school setting. I remember tipping my chair all the time, all the time, like, you get in trouble for it. I was always tipping my chair back. Sometimes they fall. But most of the time you wouldn't. You knew that fulcrum point like that was like just the right amount back.

But if you think about what we're doing today, kids are not moving their heads, right? It's like you're sitting in the car, you're driving around, you're sitting in school, you're sitting on a screen, you're sitting, you know, you're watching television. This has completely changed. And so the vestibular sense you talk about is sort of like a cornerstone sense, you know where the other things build on it. So what what are some things that can happen if that vestibular sense is not developed to where it needs to be?

Carla: So we see this one in hyperactive children attempting to get that proprioception. And what they'll do, they run, they can run all day, but they can't stand with balance on one foot. So they're missing the balance piece. And because they're missing the balance piece it affects everything because this vestibular system affects the eyes and the movement constant movement of the eyes.

And unless we can constantly move our eyes, we cannot take in information. We know that when our eyes are, when we're present our eyes are constantly moving in alignment and timing, and these children have such a hard time doing that. So they're they're attempting to get it by, you know, they're they're moving, but they're not moving in a balanced way. They're missing that balance. And so this is not functioning properly.

It's interesting to me, too, with autistic children or people on the autism spectrum. One of the things is they have a difficult time feeling their body, knowing their body like you were saying joints. And so one of the things that we do is we will work with them with their fingers like this, you know, helping them to feel that, but not just pulling on the fingers but pushing in on them because it gives message to those joints where they are in space. And if you see these hyperactive kids or autistic kids, they're running into things all the time. You know, they're they're not aware of where they are in space. And so they may pick up a stick and hit kids. They don't mean to do they, they don't have a sense of distance and space.

Ginny: And I have read about understanding pressure. They're starting to be articles about kids that are falling out of their chairs. And this is all kids, you know, they can't hold their body upright or they're banning tag because the kids don't know how much pressure to apply and they're hitting too hard. And they're not mean, you know, they're not trying to be mean or rough or bullying, but they just don't physically know, you know, how do you hold a chick without squashing it, you know, or these different things? And that’s proprioception, which I think is interesting.

I have a little bit of background because my midwife, her sons, went to a Rudolf Steiner school here in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And so she told me some of this stuff when my kids were younger. She talked about, you know, the kids should be able to reach over and touch their ear, and that shows that their body proportions they're ready to read and and that type of thing. But she talked about let them carry stacks of wood and I remember thinking, “This is weird, you know?” But all my kids loved to all do that. They're picking up these logs and they want to hold the wheelbarrow. You know, they're doing these things - they're hanging, so they're feeling they're all in their joints.

And I guess it's this kind of like miracle where when you step back in, you're like, “Oh, I don't have to initiate any of this.” They're just going to do it if I put them in the right environment. It's such a message of hope, Carla, that this is not quite so hard, right? That if I just take them outside and there's some logs and maybe I have a wheelbarrow and they're going to kind of get what they need, they're going to direct it.

Carla: Yes. Maria Montessori calls it purposeful play to things like even in the classroom or whatever cleaning, you know, clean and scrubbing the floor. And it was funny. I was in a classroom there, Maria Montessori classroom, and here was this little two year old. And the chairs are all weighted, so they have to pick the chairs up to move them, which is wonderful. But he had a trolley with dishes China dishes to put out for lunch. And he says, “I have to be really careful that I don't break things” and he's having to set the table.

And then a little girl that was two also had gone out and gotten some flowers, and she was very pure pouring water into this to put the flowers on the table. And, you know, and they're also using knives and peelers and, you know, things that are sharp in order to learn the sense of them. You know, usually when they're three, they have to cut up the vegetables for the lunches and stuff like that.

Ginny: They're having all of these hands-on experiences, feeling those little differences, how much pressure do you have to put to to slice through a cucumber and how is that different than a carrot?

OK, so then this is the interesting thing I learned from your book, too, is that this is this is a certain period of time where kids are developing these different senses and that the fluid is moving through the ear and you're developing the vestibular sense. But then for me, for example, I can't even swing anymore without feeling like I'm going to get sick. So what changes? And I guess it's important to know that it does change because you kind of have this window of time. What changes like around adolescence or adulthood that all of a sudden I'm not somersaulting anymore.

Carla: Well, you should be.

Ginny: Probably, and you do give some good ideas, you give some really good ideas for adults to continue with vestibular work.

Carla: When you go through puberty, the fluid in the inner ear, in the cochlea. And actually it's in the semicircular canals thickens. And so there's these little hair cells and stuff that and little crystals of sand that move when you move. So it's constantly telling you where your head's at, OK?

That fluid thickens. And so when you spin, it takes a little longer for you to come back to stability. But we should be spinning. It helps our balance. I know I work with older adults and their greatest fear is falling and breaking something.

Children love to spin. That's a really important thing because it's activating that whole vestibular system that we as adults. I still spin.

Ginny: This is good to know.

Carla: You know, if you're in water, it's easier to spin, but just fine till you start to feel a little dizzy and then right behind your ear is a lump. It's called the mastoid bone, and it's is in that bone where the semicircular canals reside. So if you hold that. And then you also hold right below your naval or you can't see me doing that right now that I'm holding, which is the center of gravity on our body. So holding that, you know and then holding the other side. Well, you don't get seasick or airsick or carsick, you'll be ok. So just giving yourself a spin until you start to feel a little dizzy, then do these and then keep spinning a little bit more each day. And your balance will be better. It's great.

Ginny: What I got out of your book is that these things that we do, and I didn't really think about doing this as an adult now, but that these things that we do, they're protecting our brain for the long haul. And now you're talking about protecting the body, you know, because if our balance is better, there's less likely of a chance to fall.

I was thinking when you brought up and we went on a little walk this morning, we're doing it's December. So we're doing like a little outdoor advent. They're really simple activities. But we went out, we did 20 minutes. We were looking for how many birds we can find. And it seemed like it was going to be silly, but it was fun. Even my 13 year old, he said, “This was kind of cool.”

Anyway, our five year old, she's, you know, there's a path, but she's up on the side of it and so you you talk in your book about, I guess I just love the simplicity. You know, “The simple act of walking uphill or on uneven ground helps strengthen the back and neck muscles thus allowing the head to balance properly so the eyes can more easily team together. “

So this team together piece is something that I didn't know about either. You know, you think about eye sight as 20-20, but then I learned from you about this teaming together and how obviously your eyes have to track together in order to read. And so how does outdoor play and all those movements, the brain gym movement, how do they help eventually with reading and and with the eyes tracking together?

Carla: So just going back a little bit, the eyes are our least accurate sense and vision, only four percent of vision comes through the eyes as light and color. 96 percent is manufactured in our brain from our other senses.

So babies, what are they doing? They're constantly touching things, you know, and and they're at their mouth. The mouth and the tongue are very a huge part of the brain are picking up information about their world. They're constantly picking up information and formulating a visual field within the brain. OK, so that I can shut my eyes and I can touch them, and I can kind of tell what it is from the shape of it. Yeah, because I have an internal visual image there so the child needs to be moving and touching needs hands on feet, on body on. They need to be crawling through their environment in order to pick up an understanding of near and far, hard and soft. You know, all of the different senses that make up, you know, I think my daughters would, you know, touch my face, you know, and lick mommy, you know, when they were babies, they're getting information about their world. The other thing is just what you were saying walking on uneven ground. We're getting so much information on our feet. And it's good to be barefoot, not right now in December.

Ginny: But even here and there it's warm enough. And I have found that as soon as as soon as spring hits, all my kids take their shoes off. I mean, it'll still be pretty cold and their body is craving that. You have a quote in here. I think it's so fascinating. You say, “The more children can go barefoot, the more they develop their sense of balance and their entire vestibular system, which in turn affects their hearing, attention, language and all learning.”

So many of your sentences are so jam packed. There's so much in that one sentence. So you said it's affecting their eyes and it's affecting their vestibular sense, the balance, their attention just by going barefoot.

Carla: Yeah. So the more they can get information, the better off they're going to be. So walking on uneven ground or walking up hills and down hills and you know, so I know in playgrounds, they try to make it flat and they try to make it soft. And that's not real helpful. And in the house, you know, we've got all this furniture for them to be climbing on when they're young and when they're ready, they will pull themselves up on things we shouldn't have them walking before. They're ready and ready is usually a year of age. Before that, they need to be crawling through their environment because it helps cross lateral. It actually helps the eyes to team better when they're crawling.

I had parents say 'oh by my child walked when they were seven months' and I'm like, hmmmm are they OK? Because they need that crawling - it uses more of the body and especially the core area in order to do a cross lateral movements, once they're standing up they're on their legs and they're not doing those cross lateral movements. Later walking just like you taking a walk with your kiddos this morning, you're doing cross lateral integrated movements walking. Now we know how important it is that, you know, for everybody, for a lifetime. Walking is the key exercise that we know that helps the brain, that helps everything.

Ginny: And when we're walking and you talk about the eyes tracking, you know, we're walking and we've got this up and down motion, or especially kids who are running through their environment or crawling. They're constantly having to adjust their gaze. And so, you know, they're learning.

You talk here about the rods and the cones and you say they're not fully developed until, I think, around seven or eight, and that most kids are not physically ready to read at age five because the collagen fibers aren't completely shaped until age nine.

So how is this early reading affecting eyesight beyond sort of self-esteem?

You know, I think it's interesting you started off talking about the first thing you said was you didn't read until age 10, and we are a homeschooling family, so we wait as well based off of those Scandinavian countries and the Rudolf Steiner School there. They don't start until seven or eight and then they start in a story form. It's really kind of a magical. I learned it all from a midwife.

You know, it's kind of fun, but you know, for our own kids and we started later and they learned in just a couple of months. I mean, in ten minutes a day, little segments or so, it was really easy. It kind of felt like nothing. I don't even really totally know how my fourth kid learned how to read, but she can, you know. And then she's reading to her sibling.

There's a lot of stigma here.

Carla: People, for some reason, people believe that if you're reading early, you're smart and it's not, you know, and we're seeing right now a 300 percent increase of myopia as when children go to school because they're asking them to read, their eyes are not ready to do that. And children will do anything for love, anything you know.

And so in the Scandinavian countries, what you are talking about is how they start when they go to school is the teacher will say, write me a story. Write a story. So the children write, and this is interesting too, they write in cursive, so they'll write a story. I'll just write a little story. Interesting. So they write in cursive like that because that is when we check the brain do a brain scan like an EEG.

When people write in cursive, both hemispheres are active when they print only the left hemisphere is active, ok?

And so what we know is that the the right hemisphere is actually the key hemisphere up until about the age of eight. So you want them to do this cursive, so they write their story.

Now, I can't read that, but they can. So they read the stories to the teacher. And the teachers says, “Oh, you really like cats” and they go, “Yeah.” So the teacher says, “Well, this is how I write cats.” Then she writes the symbol for what they're interested in.

So tying it into that? Well, pretty soon it shows up in all their stories and they then read their stories to their friends and their friends start using cats in their stories because cats are important, so they're learning what is emotionally important. The the symbology, the words that are important to them. You know, there's there's some consistency going on, and with this, we just give these four and a half five year olds a book and say, “OK, read.”

Ginny: And yeah, I mean, what are what a fun way to do it? The one that stuck out to me from the Rudolf Steiner School was my midwife had told me about the king, you know, and the king. He has the sound, you know, whatever. The king needed help and he looked all over his kingdom and he asked, you know, the jester? And he asked the farmer and the, you know, no one could help him. And finally, the cat, you know, so it's sort of a similar thing, right? And you know that they share these sounds. And I thought, Well, what a fun way to introduce it. You know, in the same thing, if they're old enough, you know, their eyes are fully formed in their ears are fully formed in their adult teeth are coming in that there's all these physical markers of reading readiness that I never heard anyone talk about, you know, until I met my midwife and I started reading books like yours.

Carla: The other thing is singing, you know, and having them sing their favorite songs and write out the symbology for that so they have something to hook it onto. But singing, they found that children that have dyslexia and dyslexia is a hearing problem. Primarily, they're not being able to pick up the distinct, different tones they're unable to pick those up in, especially the choice of language. So there they have a hard time speaking the language as well as hearing it. And so they found two things really help. One is putting them in a choir because when they're singing, you're vibrating the whole body and especially the head and you're picking up these different tones.

And then the other, of course, is to get the vestibular system working right so they can work with balance.

Ginny: And it says in your bio that you're a musician. That stuck out to me. What kind of a musician are you?

Carla: Well, I play the violin and I have since I was seven. And I play it ukulele. Everybody plays ukulele these days. My husband plays all the woodwinds, but he also plays bass, guitar and piano. And I play piano, too. But music is really, really a key to this.

Ginny: I had written out a quote where you said that kids who are involved in the arts score better.

It says, “Students who participate in the arts outperform those who don't on virtually every measure.”

Another big statement from your book. So your instrument of choice is violin. That's your favorite, but you play a lot of them.

Carla: Yeah, it's interesting to I talk about that, the violin, the way it sits, it's sitting on bone, so it's sitting here, my clavicle and it's also sitting on my jaw, OK, when I'm playing the violin, and so I'm getting all this vibrations from my head, which is helping me. It keeps me alert. It helps me to think more clearly.

I mean, we know that what you were saying that sixty nine percent of people are playing a musical instrument, so get the dementia or Alzheimer's. So I'm hoping for that. Yeah. And but the other thing is instruments like a flutophone.

So it doesn't have to be an expensive instrument, something where the it sits on the teeth and vibrates the head. We see huge improvement with children that are having difficulties in school or with reading.

Ginny: This is fascinating. I actually didn't think about because I play the piano that's like my favorite thing to do. We get outside because it helps all of us feel better. But if I could do anything with my time, I would play the piano and I started when I was young, like you, but I wouldn't have thought about it, and my husband plays the drums. He's phenomenal. And then our kids are doing piano and guitar and some little different things, and one of them really likes to sing, but I wouldn't have thought about it with that. With that quote, 69 percent, you know, I wouldn't have thought about the effect of different types of instruments, you know, and how they sit on the body.

I've got a friend that plays the harp so beautifully, but that's a heavy instrument that sits back on her, on her shoulder, and that's something really interesting to think about. It makes you want to play all the instruments, right? Just pick up all of the different instruments.

Carla: Play instruments again, help with math, as you know, because it's giving you the mathematical kinds of things, but they shouldn't start with that. They shouldn't start by learning notes, but that sit down and pick out their favorite song on the piano. So they're just being creative with that.

Ginny: Yeah, we have only just scratched the surface of your book. It's so fantastic. There's one more topic that you brought up about the cursive in the hemispheres of the brain that I learned from your book that I didn't know before. Maybe this can be our last topic here, but and I think you have a book about it as well.

So you know if you're right handed or left handed. But I did not know that there are these dominance things that extended to other other things like right-eye dominance or left-eye or right-ear dominant. Can you explain how many different types of dominances that there could be? And then how does that sort of affect a child, maybe school performance? Why is it good to know those different specific things about our kids.

Carla: OK. From my research about the age of nine weeks in utero, we develop the moro reflex, which is a survival reflex. And what happens at that time we develop like a lead functions like a lead hand, so if we have to fight this hand goes out, you don't have to even think about it to leave function or if we have to run, there's a lead leg lead foot that'll lead us away to run and survive.

We also develop a lead eye. We're not totally binocular because we've got this nose between our eyes. And so there's one eye that leads and you can see that if you are, if you make a window like this and you look through it, you know you can on this. But if I'm looking through this window, there only be one eye that will look through that window. And when I close that eye, I can't see. It's interesting there are. So because we're not totally binocular, they need to track together, but they're not going to be totally binocular seeing a little off.

We also have a lead ear and we have a lead hemisphere of the brain when we look at pet scans, positron emission tomography scans. What you'll find is that one side of the brain in during stress, during survival, stress in our culture is actually survival in the body that goes back to the basis of Maslow's hierarchy. We have to survive. OK. What will happen is one side of the brain will be acting, the neocortex of the brain will actually shut down by 70 to 85 percent during survival, not using your frontal lobe at all, except for the motor cortex so that you can just survive. And you know, anyway. So what we find is that we have these dominance patterns and with just the hand, eye, ear and foot and brain dominance, hemispheric dominance, there are thirty two profiles that we can get out of this. Most of them are mixed profiles, so you may be right brain dominant, left eye, right ear, left hand. But it's a survival profile, but also it's a preference profile. So it shows us what our preferences are like.

For instance, I'm right eye dominant. And so when I go in and if I were in a classroom, I would want to sit on the right hand side because my eye is going to do this. It's going to go across to look at things from the left to the right. So there's a whole science that goes with this. Because of that, we're different.

What's really interesting to me is that 80 to 90 percent of children that are in special ED classes are right brain dominant. And what it tells me is that our curriculum in our schools, our educational curriculum is not suited to everybody, it's suited to those that are logic brain, left brain dominant. And so we're missing those students that are right brain dominant, right brain are kinesthetic. They need to move, you know, and so they're the ones that get into trouble because they're always needing to move. They're the ones that are very rhythm oriented, so they're needing to move in relation to rhythm. They are spontaneous and they are intuitive.

Ginny: So many amazing qualities.

Carla: The amazing qualities that we kind of overlook and say, “Well, in our testing, we're testing language and math.”

The language centers for verbal language are in the left hemisphere. I am right dominant. When I'm under stress, I cannot talk. Or if I do, it's emotional.

That's the other thing. The right hemisphere is more emotional. And so, you know, we want to get rid of the emotion. We want everybody to sit still and be quiet and learn.

Ginny: You have a whole book about this and I've got to read it. The Dominance Factor: How knowing your dominant eye, ear, brain hand and foot can improve your learning.

I'm reading it. I'm bringing you back on. If you're available, I want to read the other one because it is fascinating and I’ve never heard about it.

When I used to teach, I taught math and I taught all sorts of different levels. And so the, you know, the sort of entry level math in high school was called something like basic math. They should have had a better name for it.

But anyway, so you know, you have these these children, and I remember that one semester I had a class of I think there was 36 of them, and I just love the kids. They're so awesome. And now, you know, but there were so many of them and a lot of them had, you know, an IEP, an individual plan. And, you know, so they needed some different accommodations.

And so many of them said they needed to sit in the front row and I was like, I don't have to have that many seats. You know, the class isn't even set up to accommodate, but this is interesting to think about. Well, it should have specified where, you know, left side, right side, you know, those things would have really mattered. And so this is such an interesting conversation for educators. You know, we're missing that piece. That front row may not matter as much as front left side or front right side. Or maybe the back would have been fine as long as they're on the right or or on the left and.

Carla: If they're left handed and right brain, they need to be in the back of the room where they can be very kinesthetic, they need to be using their hands all the time.

Ginny: I loved this one. I love this one. You said, “Whenever touch is combined with the other senses much more of the brain is activated.”

So you talked about having clay. You know, kids are moving their hands, their brain is activated. But then you said you had a a woman who knitted through all of your classes and you said she never lifted a pencil, but she ended with an A… and nine sweaters. That was one of my favorite little parts of your book. Just a reminder that, you know, we don't have to be maybe taking notes. I'm a doodler, but you know, the kids don't maybe have to be taking notes in order to learn. Maybe it would be better if they're just sculpting with clay and listening or knitting or those different types of things.

Well, Carla, this book like said, it gave me hope. It made me excited. It made me notice more, all the things that you know, our kids are doing and and celebrate them. So if people are interested, Carla and finding out more about you and about your books, can you tell them real quick where, where? Where's a good place to go? Website or Amazon?

Carla: Yeah, any you know, if you put my name in anywhere, things come up and my publishers are Great River Books and they have a lot of information there, too.

Ginny: Are there two books right now? I know you've written more than two.

Carla: Four. OK, there's four. Playing in the Unified Field is my latest one. Awakening the Child Heart is no longer in press, but you can get it on Amazon.

Ginny: Okay. And sometimes you can get it used.

Carla: OK and they're all e-books at this point, too.

Ginny: And you have a DVD, Education in Motion. Last night, I was making sure I was ready and I thought, Oh wait, I missed these other books. I've been so focused in on this one, so I'm really excited to read the other ones.

Carla, we usually end with a favorite outdoor childhood memory that you have, something that you can think of from your own childhood.

Carla: Actually, all of my memories of outside are great. We would spend the summer in Iowa on the farm and those were fantastic. I mean, I was outside from dawn until dark, you know, playing with the animals and and helping in the fields and playing in the hay now with my cousins and just being out and about. I have many, many I mean, I actually grew up in Salt Lake, so we were in the mountains. My folks loved to camp and camp, and here in Montana I have a perfect, beautiful, wonderful place up in the mountains and I go there all the time and hike and walk and just take the time - one of the things I always say to parents or to anybody is stop - just stop and take the time to look deeply in, you know, wherever you are. It keeps you healthy, it helps you learn better and just be present in the moment.

And being in nature right now, we have nature deprivation disorder. Nature deficient disorder with our children that are not in nature. And the other thing is they need to touch just what you're saying. And every time we touch each other, that's important too- rough and tumble play outside on the grass, you know, touch increases nerve growth factor, helps our nerves to grow and helps to stabilize the nerves and grow. And we're growing nerves until the day we die.

Ginny: So, Carla, you have just so inspired me in my parenting and with my own life. It is such a life changing message to know that we can have these impacts through simple means that it doesn't have to be super difficult, and even in your book, you go through the different brain gym activities and they're, you know, they're fairly straightforward. You know, most people can just do them with what they have and they really do make your brain tired. I was I remember trying and they wake your brain up. You know, I do a couple of them if I'm going to be speaking or so, they're just great tools.

And so, Carla, I so appreciate you and what you've put out in the world. I know you are affecting so many families and so many educators around the globe. Thank you for your time.

Carla: Thank you, Ginny. Thank you for what you're doing.