The full text of "The Thinking Child: a handbook for parents" is available to download here in pdf format. A hard copy of this booklet can also be ordered from Susan R. Sheridan for $10. Contact her here for more information. An excerpt is below:
"From birth to six years of age, try the following mark-making exercises with your young children. The results will be remarkable.
Think of how quickly your baby changes and grows. Your child’s brain changes and grows as quickly, and as dramatically, and, in some cases, as irreversibly. Your toddler can not go back to being a newborn. The six-year old’s brain can not go back to infancy, and start all over again, unraveling damaged or tangled neural nets.
The brain is marvelously modifiable, plastic, changeable, fixable, self-repairable. It is redundant. That means the brain has more neurons than it needs. Still, brain damage resulting from neglect or abuse or over-stimulation can last a lifetime.
If a child does not think he can talk very well, or write or read very well, or interact very well by the time he is six, it is going to be very rough sledding to convince him in elementary school or as an adolescent or as an adult that he can do otherwise.
You want your little child to go out into the world as whole and happy and capable as possible. To be whole and happy and capable, your child needs to be able to get along with other people, your child needs to know how to use his or her brain to its own special optimum levels, and your child needs to be literate. Your child needs to be able to read and write a range of symbols including visual images and words. Otherwise, your child is at the mercy of the media and popular culture. Your child may be unable to extract enough information from text and image to make informed, intelligent choices.
It is never too young to talk to children or to read to them and write with them. You do not ask yourself twice about chatting with your new-born. This book will show you how to chat with very young children about marks, starting with scribbles.
The returns on the investment of time and energy spent on conversations around scribbling and drawing and writing with children will be large — even huge. These returns will include feelings of closeness with your children based on the understanding we get from each other by listening, looking, and talking together. The returns will also optimize your child’s intelligence in terms of observable skills, including social skills, speaking skills, and drawing, writing, and reading skills.
The theory supporting this handbook is called neuroconstructivism * (Sheridan, 1990). The Latin word “neuro” means “brain”, and the verb “construo, construare” means “to build.” It is my position as a parent, a teacher, an academic researcher, and as a scholar that mark-making builds human brains in special ways. It is also my position that mark-making begins with scribbling and that scribbling is a deeply significant event in your child’s life, as important as beginning to walk or talk.
Neuroconstructivist theory and the practice called Drawing/Writing support the idea that the way children learn to think in early childhood using marks organizes and structures their brains for a lifetime of symbolic thinking. Symbolic thinking simply means humans think using objects which were originally marks made by our hands and seen by our eyes. This kind of thinking makes our brains different from other mammals, including other primates.
How do we know? We know because monkeys and cats and dogs and whales and ravens and porpoises, as intelligent as these creatures are, do not draw, or write and produce algebraic statements or compose symphonic scores. I am not saying our thinking is better. I am saying it is different. Our children are not porpoises or monkeys. They are human beings. They have human brains. Human brains have evolved to think using marks. We humans are mark-makers of significance.
Can we change the ways we think and feel? Sometimes we can and sometimes we cannot. Basic feelings about worthiness and competence, attitudes about how we relate to other people are established in early childhood. It is this book’s position that basic feelings about reading and writing are laid down in early childhood, too. This handbook shows parents how to help their children learn to read and write with skill and confidence and enjoyment and courage.
If we open the “black box” of the brain, taking a peek inside, what do we see? We see two hemispheres, two major abilities: one visual, one verbal.
Our children’s brains have evolved to write and read images, and our children’s brains have evolved to write and read words.
Evidence of these two major human abilities showed itself a long time ago on cave walls.
In this prehistoric cave painting, we see a nicely rendered horse in profile, and a strange geometric shape hovering above it as well as several dashed lines in front of the muzzle of the horse. There are two different symbol systems in this image. One is called “representational” or “pictorial” drawing, and the other is called — something else. We do not know if cave people were using their own version of mathematics or their own version of writing, but they were using qualitatively different kinds of marks in this image. We have to conclude that the extra marks are meant to be there, and must be meant to help the viewer “read” the image."
Think of how quickly your baby changes and grows. Your child’s brain changes and grows as quickly, and as dramatically, and, in some cases, as irreversibly. Your toddler can not go back to being a newborn. The six-year old’s brain can not go back to infancy, and start all over again, unraveling damaged or tangled neural nets.
The brain is marvelously modifiable, plastic, changeable, fixable, self-repairable. It is redundant. That means the brain has more neurons than it needs. Still, brain damage resulting from neglect or abuse or over-stimulation can last a lifetime.
If a child does not think he can talk very well, or write or read very well, or interact very well by the time he is six, it is going to be very rough sledding to convince him in elementary school or as an adolescent or as an adult that he can do otherwise.
You want your little child to go out into the world as whole and happy and capable as possible. To be whole and happy and capable, your child needs to be able to get along with other people, your child needs to know how to use his or her brain to its own special optimum levels, and your child needs to be literate. Your child needs to be able to read and write a range of symbols including visual images and words. Otherwise, your child is at the mercy of the media and popular culture. Your child may be unable to extract enough information from text and image to make informed, intelligent choices.
It is never too young to talk to children or to read to them and write with them. You do not ask yourself twice about chatting with your new-born. This book will show you how to chat with very young children about marks, starting with scribbles.
The returns on the investment of time and energy spent on conversations around scribbling and drawing and writing with children will be large — even huge. These returns will include feelings of closeness with your children based on the understanding we get from each other by listening, looking, and talking together. The returns will also optimize your child’s intelligence in terms of observable skills, including social skills, speaking skills, and drawing, writing, and reading skills.
The theory supporting this handbook is called neuroconstructivism * (Sheridan, 1990). The Latin word “neuro” means “brain”, and the verb “construo, construare” means “to build.” It is my position as a parent, a teacher, an academic researcher, and as a scholar that mark-making builds human brains in special ways. It is also my position that mark-making begins with scribbling and that scribbling is a deeply significant event in your child’s life, as important as beginning to walk or talk.
Neuroconstructivist theory and the practice called Drawing/Writing support the idea that the way children learn to think in early childhood using marks organizes and structures their brains for a lifetime of symbolic thinking. Symbolic thinking simply means humans think using objects which were originally marks made by our hands and seen by our eyes. This kind of thinking makes our brains different from other mammals, including other primates.
How do we know? We know because monkeys and cats and dogs and whales and ravens and porpoises, as intelligent as these creatures are, do not draw, or write and produce algebraic statements or compose symphonic scores. I am not saying our thinking is better. I am saying it is different. Our children are not porpoises or monkeys. They are human beings. They have human brains. Human brains have evolved to think using marks. We humans are mark-makers of significance.
Can we change the ways we think and feel? Sometimes we can and sometimes we cannot. Basic feelings about worthiness and competence, attitudes about how we relate to other people are established in early childhood. It is this book’s position that basic feelings about reading and writing are laid down in early childhood, too. This handbook shows parents how to help their children learn to read and write with skill and confidence and enjoyment and courage.
If we open the “black box” of the brain, taking a peek inside, what do we see? We see two hemispheres, two major abilities: one visual, one verbal.
Our children’s brains have evolved to write and read images, and our children’s brains have evolved to write and read words.
Evidence of these two major human abilities showed itself a long time ago on cave walls.
In this prehistoric cave painting, we see a nicely rendered horse in profile, and a strange geometric shape hovering above it as well as several dashed lines in front of the muzzle of the horse. There are two different symbol systems in this image. One is called “representational” or “pictorial” drawing, and the other is called — something else. We do not know if cave people were using their own version of mathematics or their own version of writing, but they were using qualitatively different kinds of marks in this image. We have to conclude that the extra marks are meant to be there, and must be meant to help the viewer “read” the image."