Organization is one of the main ingredients for successful learning and the development of children?s intelligence.
Our bodies, our brains and our world are organized into systems and even the root word organ is built into organization.
One only has to look into nature to see the beauty and strength of organization. Jean Piaget, a major contributor to cognitive development, spent years studying children?s learning and intelligence and his two most important words are organization and adaptation.
Essentially, we organize to adapt. For most species to survive they need to organize and adapt to their changing environments.
Humans are no different, and the sooner we recognize this fact the more effective our children?s ablity to learn and allow their true intelligence to unfold.
However, the problem many children face in today?s complex world is that the child?s organizational skills should begin at home.
Unfortunately, for many children the home experience and the development of organizational skills are sometimes nonexistent.
In my humble opinion, one of the reasons we are seeing so many children failing to learn and express their true intelligence is because of the disorganization in their personal lives.
Interesting, for most children it doesn?t necessarily begin this way.
From the moment the child steps onto the world?s stage, they try to dictate organization to parent or guardians. When to eat, sleep and attend to their bodily needs are only cries to parents that they need organization in their lives to survive.
However, as the child grows older you find many children simply trying to adapt themselves to their parent?s often disorganized lives. Separation, divorce, single- parent homes, movement from one home to another; three days with this one and three days with that one, and what you create is a brain that is ill equipped to adapt to other organized learning environments such as school.
Teachers spend much of their time trying to remediate their student?s lack of organizational skills by structuring classroom environments into centers like systems and lessons that are highly systemic or interactive, structural and developmental. Perhaps the high increase in ADD and ADHD students could be the result of years of disorganization in such children?s personal lives?
To improve the lack of organization in children's lives, weekly or monthly calendars should be the parent?s bible. Next should come white boards, hung in full display, so children can see their daily schedule and important events, however trivial. What time they awake and when they go to bed; the predictability of dinnertime and so forth. Furthermore, when monthly calendars advertise long range planning for special activities they can actually stimulate the higher centers of the children's brain by connecting to the future.
The first strategy I ask many of my new clients is for parent and child to first write out, and then adhere to a 30 minute daily/weekly block schedule for one week. For their second visit, I ask parent and child to recite the weekly schedule from memory.
The purpose is to show are much more intelligent the world becomes when you experience the feeling of being organized.
Interestingly, in time children actually begin to take the lead and demand from their parents the need to organize their personal lives.
Therefore, the next time you hear a baby cry, it is only their way of telling us that organization is directly connected to adaptation and not something that begins and ends at the digression of the parent. .
*David Sortino, Ed.M, Ph.D. For further information contact davidsortino@comcast.net or 707-480-1649
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