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Learning with your hands
In order to help teachers use our paint and clay more often and more efficiently in class, we have launched the Learning with your hands concept. Various education experts and the play therapists from Intraverte helped us develop it. During this concept, the hands are linked to the brain in a powerful way, to give the children’s development and the learning process a big boost. How exactly does that work? We asked Ingrid Bunnik, child remedial therapist with a practice at Intraverte.
“That happens via the (fine) motor skills. There are a lot of senses in your hands, sensors. Your hands are actually an expansion of your eyes. There are also a lot of nerve cells in your eyes. These are protrusions of your brain. With the collaboration between your hands, your eyes and your brain, you can stimulate many different things. You see a ball and you know ‘that’s a ball’. And when you pick up the ball with your hands, your nervous system receives information on how it feels and what it means. In other words, if you touch something with your hands, you’ll understand it better. Try using clay to sculpt the letter ‘e’, for example. You’ll feel the letter and understand it better, as well as the shape and sound. And if you can think of words that sound with the letter ‘e’, like elephant or eagle, you’ll have even more information about the letter. The more senses and functions you use, the better your brain will store the experiences. You’ll understand it better.
So stimulating motor skills is very important, not just for the learning process, but also for general development. If a child hasn’t learned to control (motoric) reflexes yet, they can’t sit still. This makes learning to write very difficult. You’re wriggling on your chair, so you can’t shape the letters and numbers and you don’t understand their meaning. On top of that, you have to focus on your work and what the teacher is saying, and not get distracted by stimuli, like noises. All of these processes are refined and automated by the development of the motor skills. If that development didn’t go optimally, you can get learning difficulties with reading, writing and arithmetic. With arithmetic, this mostly applies to spatial insight. If you haven’t spent enough time playing (outside) and exploring your space by climbing, sliding, falling and getting back up, your spatial orientation will be less developed. Or if you haven’t played enough with clay or other materials, stacking them or putting them in a certain order, concepts like more and less, and higher and lower will be difficult for you. That’s why stimulating and developing the (fine) motor skills is very important, to avoid learning difficulties in subjects like language or arithmetic.”
With our free lesson materials, combining clay and paint with core subjects like arithmetic and language, you'll experience the power of Learning with your hands yourself! Discover our lesson plans here.