How does the brain learn? What builds brain density and effectiveness? What is the process that unleashes the awesome power of the brain?
"If there is to be power in your learning experiences it must come from tapping the energies and curiosities of your children, freeing them of artificial fragmentations and unleashing the awesome power of the brain." Susan Kovalik
The brain learns by sensory experience. "Being There Experiences," involving the full spectrum of sensory input, build brain density and poise the brain for effective learning on more symbolic levels.
The brain sorts through the onslaught of stimuli and organizes the similarities and differences, sounds, sights, information, and language. As it works on this automatic function, it is constantly searching for patterns, and grouping like information together. If information is presented in a pattern, it is easier for the brain to store and retrieve.
The year-long EPIC Adventure is a powerful pattern. Children remember the things they learn during these years because the brain has an established pattern on which to place the entire year's information.
"The more powerful a brain, the more complex, finer, and subtle patterns it can detect."Leslie Hart, Human Brain and Human Learning
Children who live well-planned, year-long EPIC Adventures, with significant, meaningful content, learn to detect subtle patterns; see depth and metaphor within information and experiences; and unleash the awesome power of their brains.
"It is an art to work with and teach children. It is the highest creative pursuit. In no other situation are you working with such a majestic medium. The outcomes are so far beyond any skills or application you put into them.
All other finished products or results of our creativity begin to descend from the height of their beauty the minute they are completed. Not only are they inanimate, but dust, decay, and the elements lessen the illumined glow they once had; the bright newness fades. Not so with children. The masterpiece is ever fresh and new, not only enhancing what you gave, but creating itself -- the product contributing to the process, ever expanding beyond the limits of even the best of our efforts.
How hallowed is the studio where such work occurs. Do we understand even in minute ways the meaning of this remarkable gift and setting where Heavenly Father places mothers? Few on earth could contemplate even the first step on the path of creativity that teaches us to be like the Creator. The creative process of nurturing, teaching, inspiring, and inviting our children is the workshop of the gods. No other place, but our homes, can such a workshop be found.
And such a Master Craftsman is always at our side waiting to fill our minds and hearts with every step of the process. Always there at our bidding, we work hand in hand with God to uncover and release the form that has always been, yet cannot be without us. " Karen Kindrick Cox