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Inside the first grader’s brain

Hank Pellissier

“That’s not fair!”
If your six-year-old pleas for justice are driving you nuts, take a note: your child’s fixation on fairness is developmentally positive. The first-grader’s swiftly developing brain is leaping from magical thinking to logical, rational mental processing; she’s eager to understand the principles behind rules and regulations.
First graders are incongruously attracted to both the penal code (laws, police, ethics, traffic signs, crime, jail) and to competitive winning — at all costs! They’ll panic if you jaywalk because they fear prison. But they’ll also lie, cheat, and argue to win.
What’s happening neurologically inside the firstgrader’s conflicted skull? The buzzing three-and-ahalf
foot child in front of you is experiencing major brain blasts as his cognitive circuits are getting programmed — for life! First-graders have trillions of pathways that connect their neurons in the cerebral cortex. This tangle of wiring is getting pruned in a six-year-old at an alarmingly intense rate. The rarest-used pathways are eliminated to streamline each individual’s thought process. Here’s some help to optimize your first-grader’s quickly developing mind.
Aim high
Reading help
Learning to read by “sounding out” letters in words is difficult for many kindergarteners, even if their brain’s auditory development is excellent. One reason, notes Jeannine Herron, Ph.D., author of Making Speech Visible, is that memorizing the alphabet is misleading, because letter titles — A, B, C, etc. — don’t sound precisely like the sounds they represent. For example, the letter “G” has a “j” sound, “H” is way off-base with its “AAACH” pronunciation, and all the vowels can be utilized with more than one sound. This difficulty delays thousands of struggling readers. To circumvent this, Herron recommends teaching kindergarteners to “pay attention to what their mouth is doing” when they learn phonemes.
Talk it up
Safe space
First graders need to feel relaxed and emotionally secure for their brains to learn best. Research indicates that traumatic stress and fear releases toxic levels of the hormone cortisol, which can destroy neurons in the hippocampus, a region that supports factual and episodic memory. To protect a firstgrader’s confidence, parents and other important adults should give loving, encouraging feedback, as well as minimize reprimands and threats, and avoid shouting and spanking for discipline. Express sympathy if they’re terrorized by nightmares or ashamed of bed-wetting. Many children continue enuresis until age seven or longer.
Calm the storm
Patience, patience
Dramatic six-year-olds can be exasperating, but imagine what they’re experiencing. In Your Child’s Growing Mind, by Jane M. Healy, Ph.D., she notes that, “Neuropsychologists talk about the ‘five-toseven shift’ because so much change occurs in the brain during these years. One study found that a specific area involved with language and spatial awareness had changed 85 percent between ages six and seven in one girl’s brain”.
Tuning into their minds
Focusing research
A first grader’s attention span ranges from six to 20 minutes, depending partly on gender. A report published in NeuroImage claims, “we found robust male/female differences in the shapes of the trajectories with total cerebral volume peaking at age 10.5 in females and 14.5 in males”. This difference, says Leonard Sax. M.D., author of Boys Adrift, explains why six-year-old boys can’t pay attention as long as six-year-old girls. To bolster a boy’s concentration, encourage activities like meditation and board games, and limit TV and video watching. Studies indicate screens over-stimulate stilldeveloping neurology, resulting in abbreviated attention. Why? Some researchers believe TV and video viewing wastefully releases high quantities of the neurotransmitter dopamine, a key regulator for focus.
Power Of brain and brawn
Mute emotions
Don’t expect six-year-olds to open up easily and “share their feelings”. When Harvard neuroscientists using MRI imaged activity in young children’s brains, they discovered that the cerebral cortex that does the talking is not yet connected to the amygdala, a subcortical, primitive area where emotion occurs. That’s why it makes little sense to ask first-graders to tell you why they’re feeling sad. Quite often, they don’t know!
A balance of brain food
More brain resources
1. The Developing Brain: Birth to Age Eight, by Marilee Sprenger
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