Discover the power of working with your hands

The role of the brain

How does it work? Scientific research shows that your brain has a direct and powerful connection with your hands. Your hands feel and your eyes see. Everything you see and feel is transmitted to the brain. That’s where all this information is processed. Your brain will then control what needs to happen. Do you see something falling from the table, for example? Then your brain will give a signal to your hands to grab the object quickly. So the development of the brain has a significant impact on the development of the eye-hand coordination, and vice versa.

Young children aren’t ‘left-handed’ or ‘right-handed’ yet. They treat their arms and legs equally and move them more or less symmetrically. This changes between the ages of 6 and 8. The brain has developed to the extent that the brain halves start to develop specialisations, and learn to work together. During this process, one of the brain halves usually becomes dominant. The same goes for the arms, legs and hands. Children start to prefer their left of right hands. This ‘preferred hand’ takes charge, and the other hand provides assistance.

For the benefit of the brain and eye-hand developments described above, the balance between head, heart and hands is essential. In order to stimulate this or make it more visible, you can use paint and clay. While working with paint or clay, the hands and eyes are constantly connected to the brain: what colour am I seeing? What happens when I mix the colours? How does the material feel? What happens when I push my finger into the paint? And when one half of the brain and one hand start to dominate, you can tell by the way the child works with the clay or paint. When they’re in the first grade, children are usually still making a mess by smearing fingerpaint everywhere with both hands. By the end of the next grade, they may already be painting exclusively with their right hand. You can also stimulate this. For example, you can ask a child to show how they work with both hands. Can they also do it with just their left hand? And just their right hand?

 

 

The learning process

The development of the brain is very important for the learning process. The more developed your brain is, the easier it is to learn or remember something. Fine motor skills also play an essential role in this. Expert Ingrid Bunnik says: "when you grab something with your hands, you will understand it better." Creative materials help with that. Research shows that when your students are holding clay while you’re explaining something, they will internalise it better. They will feel calmer, and they will be more focused. So just imagine how powerful paint and clay can be if you use it for central subjects. The hands will be busy with paint or clay, while the brain is focused and activated. Not just the average students, but especially the students who need some extra attention for any reason, can benefit a lot from this.

Learning with your hands!

Clay and paint are powerful materials. That’s why we worked together with game therapists and education experts to develop a lot of lesson ideas focused on ‘learning with your hands’. With these lessons, you will be using clay, paint or play sand during language, maths or world orientation. Your students will learn sorting, how to create letters and numbers, multiply or understand the meaning of proverbs and saying with paint or clay. The lessons will be a lot of fun for you and your students. Do you feel inspired? Get started right away with our lesson plans.

Sources Learning with your hands

Development line modelling material

Ages 4-6 : experience

For young children, the phases of brain development determine the way they use clay. Symmetry in their movements is important to them. Rolling clay is a typical gross motor movement that stimulates the symmetrical development phase. It’s not until after this phase that children will be ready to use their hands separately.

During the toddler phase, the sensory development is essential for children to observe and discover their own body and their environment. Tactile development is also stimulate in a fun way with clay. It’s all about experiencing the material: how does clay feel and what can you do with it?

Ages 6-9 : support

Clay can play an important supportive role in this phase. With the help of clay, children learn to link various skills to each other, while their motor skills are still being stimulated. Aside from that, the colours of the clay and the action of working with clay will stimulate the creative development of the children. A child’s choice of colours can also tell you a lot about their emotional state.

That is why clay is an effective tool to give the learning process a boost during this period. A couple of examples of how you can use clay are forming numbers, letters and words, as well as using clay to make clocks and human figures. This way, children will start to understand the world around them better with clay.

Ages 9-12 : in-depth

In the higher grades, you can use clay to get a better idea of the skills of your students. At the same times, clay can help the students develop these skills. Motoric development is still important in the higher grades, especially fine motor skills. By having your children work with clay, you are also stimulating these motor skills.

You can use clay for lessons in various subjects and for various (learning) goals, like developing spatial awareness, body consciousness, creativity and socio-emotional aspects. But you can also use clay as an additional material with your teaching method. Are the students learning maths with scale division? Have them use clay to make a house at a certain scale. This is a powerful way to stimulate the learning process.

Development line paint

Age 0 to 2.5: the energetic phase or scribble/scratch phase

The kids fill pages with stripes and colours. This way, they stimulate their gross motor abilities and express their creativity.

Age 2-3: creating circles

Slowly but surely, the scribbles turn into rounder and smaller shapes, like circles and dots. The children are slowly becoming aware of themselves and the world around them.

Age 3-4: stick figure phase

Kids learn to draw or paint characters, often with the head directly attached to the legs. They use all kinds of basic shapes, like little lines for hairs and arms with little rakes for hands. Children are still exploring in this phase: they want to discover the outside world. You can see that in their drawings.

Age 5: fantasy phase

It’s not possible to tell what the top and bottom of a drawing is yet. Children do have a better idea about what they want to draw and they reflect better on their work. They become more imaginative, and sometimes think of whole stories with their drawings. During this phase, they start to use more basic shapes, like squares and triangles.

Age 6-7: school kid phase

Drawings get a clear top and bottom, such as the sky and the ground. In this phase, objects that were previously floating will ‘land’, and more details are added. Children are becoming more and more aware of how big the world is. By giving their drawings clear boundaries with a top and bottom, they are creating a (social) footing. During this phase, you can tell how a child is feeling. Later on, they will also start drawing side views.

Age 8: fatigue phase

Children want to draw with more realism and become critical of their work. They struggle with getting what’s in their head on paper. They will also ask how they should do something to do it right more often. They seem ‘fatigued’ when it comes to drawing. Their development seems to come to a halt. Humour can help to make the children feel more confident.

Age 9: depth

When children are about 9 years old, their eyes have developed enough to let them see depth. They will try to incorporate this in their work. They start to draw objects in front of or behind other objects. Usually, the perspective isn’t quite right yet, but they do start to draw more details. Sometimes this means that their style becomes drastically different from the previous phases.

Age 10-12: geometric phase

The children start to focus on straight, geometric shapes and lines. Drawing in perspective and details are becoming more and more important. They feel the need to picture animals and humans in the correct proportions.

This development line was developed in collaboration with Bauk Zwaan