A Whole New Mind

I really enjoyed this presentation and came away with so many ideas to encourage right brain thinking in my classroom, and bring some of these activities into the class. I feel like the six aptitudes were connected well to the classroom, and I came away with a lot of ideas on how to bring all six of the aptitudes into a lesson, and effectively help students tune into their right brain thinking. So many of these activities I would have loved to have done as a student, such as the laughter yoga or the story activity, because I feel like stuff like laughter isn't encouraged in the classroom, and unless you're in an English class, thinking fictionally is something that you do very often. Sometimes kids learn best by putting facts into a story, and when kids are having fun, they're more likely to have take away something from the lesson that they're learning. As a student myself, almost every activity that we did today would have been a lot of fun to do in class, and for some of these, if we had done an activity like this during a lesson that I wasn't enjoying, I might have enjoyed the lesson more.

I think my favorite thing that we talked about in the presentation, was the importance of play, and laughter along with joyfulness and games. Kids are always complaining about how school isn't fun, and how they don't do anything fun in school, so if you, as a teacher, make an effort to make your class more fun, students might enjoy your class more. At the end of the day, as much as it might frustrate us as teachers, students are going to remember the class that they got to play a game in, over the class where they simply took notes down. Also, students are more likely to remember what they learn if they're having a fun, and it's important for them to be moving around and being active, so incorporating games and laughter and fun into your lesson, might actually help kids learn better.

I definitely want to go out now and read this book for myself. I have always found psychology and the brain to be extremely fascinating, so reading in depth about the difference between the two sides of your brain would be really interesting. Especially when you apply this psychology to the classroom, when we become teachers, we're going to have students who identify more with the left brain kind of thinking, and some who identify more with the right brain, and as teachers, it's our job to create a lesson that can be absorbed by all of our students. So, by reading this book, it might give some insight on how to help those kids who are more left brained, think more like someone who is more right brained.

Overall, I really enjoyed this presentation. I loved the different activities that we got to do and I definitely want to try and implement them into my classroom when I become a teacher. This subject was extremely fascinating and it really made me want to learn more. I definitely am going to try and use some of these ideas in my class, and am going to read this book so I can go more in depth on this topic.