On June 20th, Joey’s Foundation hosted Physical Therapist, Karen Pryor, author of Ten Fingers, Ten Toes for a full day workshop on neuroplasticity. This being one of my personal favorite topics, I was thrilled to be able to attend. 

There is so much of her presentation that I wish I could capture here. It is hard to narrow down everything we learned throughout the day. Some of her recommendations were so simple, and yet have the potential to make such a large, lasting change on a child’s development.

One key  – yet simple – point that she made was that “vision is neurologically connected to over 80% of the central nervous system” (Pryor, 34). If we want a child to master a skill, first we need to make sure we are involving their line of sight. Are we making it as easy as possible for the child to view what they are being asked to do? She even had us test this by walking through a series of exercises, changing where we looked each time. When we looked away, the task became increasingly more difficult, if not impossible. [Read more…]