Montessori Childrens House
of the west coast

All Kinds of Minds

Posted on Friday, April 17, 2009

It is important to understand that your child has distinctive systems in the brain for processing information.  These systems are generally dictated by genetics but also can be influenced greatly by the learning environment. 
I would encourage parents to understand these core cognitive functions possessed by every individual. These systems provide the foundation for how and what a person learns and sometimes how they don’t learn.
Mel Levine in his book A Mind at a Time describes these key systems:

Language:  The brains innate sensitivity to spoken and written language including the ability to process the different sounds of one’s language.

Sequential Ordering: This system is responsible for carrying out mathematical problem solving and analyzing information and directions.

Spatial Ordering:  This is the ability to visualize patterns and configurations.  This is important for math and science as well as picturing images when reading.

Motor:  The all important connection between the brain and various muscle groups.  This is the brain telling us how to move.

Social thinking:  The ability to understand and engage in a cooperative manner with others. 

Attention Control:  This is the administrative bureau of the brain and is extremely important.  It regulates and controls learning and behavior.  It directs the distribution of learning and behavior and allows your child to finish what he starts, stay alert, organize information and remain focused while filtering out distractions.

Higher Thinking:  This includes understanding more abstract concepts, thinking critically and creatively, and using problem solving skills.

Memory:  This includes immediate memory, short-term memory, long-term memory, semantic memory (generic) memory, episodic memory (for particular events), and procedural memory (knowing “how” and propositional memory (knowing “that…..”).

All of these systems when functioning properly help us to learn and lead successful lives. 
They will deteriorate when underused.  We all have variations in our ability to use each of these systems.  Some children and adults have major weaknesses in one or more of these systems and it causes learning “challenges”.  Understanding how your child is or is not processing information is important in finding the right learning environments and also helping them to compensate or strengthen the weaker systems. 
Each child also has strong and weak modalities for taking in information. These modalities vary in strength from child to child.  Some children are more auditory learners and some more visual.  Others are kinesthetic learners while others are more tactile.  My experience is that children are often combinations of all of the above.  A Montessori learning environment exposes children to many different sensory modalities for learning which is why it is so successful to many different kinds of children and their learning styles.  A Montessori teacher often tries to discover strong and weak modalities in each child.  We attempt to maximize the use of the strong modalities while strengthening the weaker modalities.  A child who can learn using more sensory modalities is a more powerful learner.  The smarter the learning environment the stronger will be a child’s skills and abilities.  Montessori classrooms are smart learning environments. 
A copy of Mel Levine’s book is in the school lending library.