Right Brain Education Activities You Can Practice at Home...

Take your child on an imaginary journey of the mind.  Ask your child to relax and close his eyes.  Talk him through a scenario - describe the things that he sees and ask him to picture them in his mind as if he were really there.  Engage all his senses:

• what does he see?
• what can he smell?
• what does he hear?
• what can he taste?
• what does he touch?

Be as detailed as you can.  As your child grows older, you will want him to start practicing this activity on his own.  The idea is for him to practice his mental imaging so that his visualisations because as sharp as a vivid memory.

Shichida believed that when it comes to flash cards, it is quantity, not quality that is important.  Therefore, show your child as many flash cards as you can.  The speed should be at a pace of one card per second.  Focus on picture cards as these will help to build your child's right brain imaging capability.

Using a series of picture cards, tell a funny story connecting all the cards together as you open each one.  Turn over the cards and try to remember the picture on each card by order.

For example, the cards are horse, eggs, fan, rhinoceros, jump rope, and ladder.  A funny story connecting the cards together might be: A horse laid some eggs which were cooked on a fan cooling down a rhinoceros who was skipping with a jump rope on top of a ladder.

Shuffle the cards and try making up new stories to recall the new order of pictures.  As your child gets better at it, make the story longer using more cards.

Tangrams are a kind of Chinese jigsaw puzzle where images are created with seven geometric shapes called "tans". Younger children start with puzzles where the position of each piece is marked and they are only required to align each tan to the outlines. As they progress and get better at the puzzle, work towards shadow outlines where the positions of each tan is not clear and the children have to work out how the tans fit together to make the complete picture.

Mandala practice in Right Brain Education involves staring at simple symmetrical patterns and training the memory to recreate them. The first step is to practice memorising the colours and where they are positioned. The goal is to be able to draw the entire mandala and mark the positions of each colour from memory.

The purpose of eye training is to improve eyeball movement, widen the field of vision, and heighten the ability to read at a glance.

Eye training exercises include:

• looking at stereograms
• eyeball movement exercises
• after image training

Stereograms

Stereogram are pictures that contain a hidden image that will appear in 3D when viewed correctly.

Eyeball Movement Exercises

These exercises involve moving your eyes rapidly from side to side, up and down, diagonally and around.

After Image Training

After image training requires staring at a picture for a period of time and then closing the eyes and attempting to see an after image of the picture on the back of the eyelids. Practice holding onto the after image for as long as possible.

Start with a 2×2 box grid. Place four pictures - one into each square. In the example on the right, we have a tree, a rabbit, a hotdog, and a bike. Show the grid with the images in position to your child for about ten seconds, then cover it.

Give your child an empty 2x2 box grid and the same four image cards and ask your child to put the pictures onto the blank grid in the same positions. When your child is done, reveal your grid and check if the pictures are in the right order.

As your child improves, increase the difficulty by increasing the size of the grid to 3×3, 4×4, 5×5, etc.