Suggestions For Brain Training At Home

To make cognitive gains, a person has to work at a task intensely. This might mean doing a more complex task than usual, or doing a familiar task more quickly. One important key is concerted effort – good old hard work. We find that working on multiple skills in one session (logic/reasoning, processing speed and auditory skills, for example) is more effective than working only one area.
Here are some ideas that could benefit your child:

o Write down a list of tasks your child can do. Alter these tasks to make them slightly more challenging. If your daughter can count to 100 by ones, for example, can she count that high by 2’s and 3’s? Could she count by 2’s and 3’s to 100 even if her starting point is a random number (say, 34 or 58)?

o Is your child able to sustain his performance at a task if he has another task to do at the same time? An example would be coloring while you ask for the answer to a simple math problem. Try combining easy activities to give your child a new challenge.

o Target both visual and auditory attention. To boost auditory attention, listen together for particular sounds or words in stories, CDs, or online recordings. To enhance visual attention, scan for hidden objects in photos or puzzles, look for targeted letters and words in narratives. Another pattern activity is to figure out what is missing in categories where there is a pattern (all red, all things you find under the sea, all letters are capitalized)

o Talk with your child about things that “go together” during your daily routine. For instance, rapidly name the items you will need for the table at dinner time (plates, napkins, forks, knives, spoons, glasses, salt, and pepper). If you are in a carpool line, naming types of transportation or automakers is a quick organizational task. This exercise helps your child see patterns and cluster similar objects.

Learning means exposure to new things. That exposure results in new synapses, greater retention of brain cells, additional neuronal networks and greater brain density. We obtain the most synapses when we work on a novel task at a challenging level, but below the level of frustration.

The new pathways will bring greater ability to demonstrate new skills. Experiment and see what your child can learn.

- written by Dr. Vicki Parker
Dr. Vicki Parker is a speech-language pathologist with a background in neuroscience. She is the owner of Learning Rx, a brain training facility in Charlotte, N.C. Parker is the author of Problem Solving, Planning and Organizational Tasks: Strategies for Retraining.