If you have ever wondered how your two year old memorised an entire song after hearing it twice, or how your four year old recognises every car brand on the road without a single lesson, you have already seen right brain learning in action.
Right brain education is the decision to teach young children through that remarkable ability. Here is what that means, and why the timing matters more than most parents realise.
The two sides of the brain, a simple picture
The brain's two hemispheres process the world differently. The left side is analytical: it handles logic, sequences and step by step thinking. The right side is intuitive: it works in images, patterns, music, emotion and big picture connections.
In the earliest years of life, children learn in the intuitive mode. They absorb whole images, whole songs, whole words and whole experiences, effortlessly, and remember them with astonishing accuracy. Right brain educators describe this as the right brain leading during early childhood, and design their teaching to speak its language.
What the research shows
Two things are firmly established in developmental science.
First, the early years are a period of extraordinary brain growth. Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child reports that more than one million new neural connections form every second in a child's earliest years, and that early experiences shape the very architecture of the developing brain.
Second, young children pass through sensitive periods: windows when certain kinds of learning come more easily than they ever will again. The clearest example is language. Research by Patricia Kuhl and her colleagues at the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences shows that infants and young children absorb the sounds and patterns of language with an ease that gradually fades with age. It is why a young child can grow up fluent in two or three languages simply by living in them.
The "right brain" framing itself comes from educators. Pioneers such as Glenn Doman and Makoto Shichida used it to describe this absorbent, intuitive, image and music led way that young children learn, and built teaching methods around it. Neuroscientists today tend to describe the same period in terms of plasticity and sensitive windows. The practical conclusion is shared: young children learn most richly through images, music, movement, story and emotion, and the early years are the most fertile time to offer them.
Why early childhood is the moment
Think about what young children accomplish with no formal teaching at all. They master an entire language, sometimes two or three, from simply hearing it. They learn hundreds of faces, songs, routines and rules of the world before anyone hands them a textbook.
Right brain education takes this appetite seriously and feeds it deliberately. It fills these years with rich images, music, movement, language and real world knowledge, offered in short, joyful doses, so that children absorb an enormous foundation while absorbing is at its easiest, and come to see learning as one of life's great pleasures.
What right brain learning looks like in a classroom
Walk into a classroom built on right brain principles and you will notice the difference within minutes. It is fast moving, musical and full of joy. You will typically see:
Images before explanations. Flash cards and picture rich materials, shown briskly and joyfully. Young minds photograph whole images and whole words with remarkable ease, so pictures carry the teaching.
Music woven through everything. Letter sounds sung, routines set to songs, rhythm used for memory. Music is one of the right brain's native languages, and it makes learning stick.
Movement as part of learning. Cross lateral movement, child friendly exercise, dance and outdoor play. In young children, the body and the brain develop together, and movement wakes up learning.
Stories and imagination at the centre. Ideas arrive wrapped in story and pretend play, because the right brain remembers what it feels.
Joy, protected deliberately. Children learn best when they feel safe, delighted and connected. A right brain classroom treats joy as a biological requirement for deep learning.
Short, lively, varied sessions. Activities change while enthusiasm is still high, so children end each one wanting more.
Reading, numbers, science and vocabulary are all present in such a classroom. They are simply delivered in the form young brains are built to receive.
What parents can do at home
You do not need special training or expensive materials to support right brain learning. The most powerful tools are already in your house, and in you.
Read aloud every day, with drama. Voices, expressions, pointing at pictures. You are building vocabulary, imagination and a lifelong association between books and warmth.
Sing more than you think you should. Songs for tidy up time, hand washing, going to bed. Anything set to music is remembered longer, and enjoyed more.
Show real things and name them. On a walk, in the kitchen, at the market: “That's a bougainvillea.” “This is a whisk.” Young children can absorb an enormous vocabulary. Feed it generously.
Let them move. Climbing, balancing, dancing, spinning. Movement is doing invisible work in a young brain.
Follow their fascinations. Dinosaurs this month, trucks the next? Lean in. Interest is the right brain's on switch.
Protect joy. If a learning moment turns tense, pause and return to it another day. At this age, how a child feels about learning matters as much as anything they learn.
And perhaps the most reassuring point of all: at this age, love and learning travel together. Every warm, playful, curious interaction is the curriculum.
The window is open right now
Right brain education is a decision to work with the extraordinary way young children already learn, through images, music, movement, story and emotion, during the few short years when that mode is at its peak.
While the window is open, a child can build something that lasts a lifetime: the deep, settled belief that learning is a joy.
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