All children, whatever their age and ability, have the potential to be better at thinking and learning. You, the parent, can help your child by providing greater richness and diversity to your child.
"Your child will use many different kinds of thinking to help her achieve success in life. There are at least nine kinds of intelligence that power her thinking mind. Each has a physical location in the brain, and provides a distinctive way of thinking. Each one enables us to solve different kinds of problem and achieve different kinds of success in the world. These different intelligences enable your child to engage in different kinds of learning. Usually we think of ourselves as having one mind, but our minds are more like an orchestra in which different parts contribute. We are sometimes aware of the need to bring these different parts of the mind to bear on a problem. Your child's mind does not just have one voice and one set of thoughts, but different voices and different sorts of thinking. To make the most of her mind we need to be aware of these and of the abilities which derive from each kind of intelligence. Every child, male or female, from whatever background, has each of these nine intelligences.
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| Intelligences |
The old view of intelligence is that it was fixed thing like a sort of motor of a fixed capacity that you were born with and which never changed. When they measured the power of this mental motor they called it your IQ. We now know that those ,with high IQs do not necessarily end up richer, happier or more successful than those with lower IQs. The brain is less like a motor of fixed capacity but more like a series of engines whose capacities are unknown. What counts is making the most of the engines (or intelligences) that power your child's mind, and home life plays an important role in achieving this. None of us has a brain that is working at full capacity; we all have mental capacities that are underdeveloped. We do not know what we might have achieved with the right help, enough time and sufficient stimulus.
What is musical intelligence?
Every kind of musical intelligence is different, and this is a different kind of intelligence from any other. Some musicians are good mathematicians, but some are not. Some research suggests that learning music will help your child be better at maths and reading. If your child concentrates on music it may help with other kinds of concentration. Playing an instrument may help physical co-ordination of hand and eye. Playing music with others may develop social skills. So developing musical intelligence may help develop other kinds of intelligence. But the best reason for bringing music into the life of your child is to develop his unique musical gift, his ability to make music and appreciate music.
Seeing more - Developing visual and spatial intelligence
"We should talk less and draw more," said Goethe. Drawing, copying, tracing and making pictures can help a child make sense of the world around her. Drawing also enables a child to make visible what is imaginary. Drawing and artwork can help to celebrate pleasures such as birthdays or parties, or enable a child to express worries and anxieties such as the ghosts and monsters of imagination. Drawing stimulates visual intelligence and can be a way through which a feeling for beauty, harmony and order is developed.
It is never too early to introduce your child to works of art, or to visit art galleries. We live in a visually rich environment, surrounded by images that clamour for our attention. The flickering pictures on the TV screen and the endless spectacle of adverts, signs and symbols create a visual overload that stimulates the eye but does not instruct the mind. Some children grow up never paying attention to anything. They don't have to. They are used to being force-fed by the televisual world that surrounds them. Children need help in attending to what is important in their visual environment. They need to be taught how to look, to sustain attention, to take in information, to see details, to learn from what is seen. They need to stop and look.
