The Secret to Smarter Children

For years science has studied the brain learning that each section has a special purpose, a concentrated focus and operations "system". We hear about quadrants of the brain or simpler yet - left brain and right brain. We call people left brain people or right brain people.

In an effort to keep things simple we tend to want to look for simple answers to the question, "What can we do to be smarter?" There are whole schools of thought focused on that concept, but it seems we just keep missing the mark. But from the oddest and most unexpected areas of life we often find genius. That seems to be the case in the rural community of Centerville in southern Iowa. It is there that a new way of thinking about learning and children's improved intelligence is being revealed. Indeed this epiphany is common in that it is coming from an unexpected place.

It started with a music teacher who had the simple idea to teach children the language of music the same way we teach children to read. The teacher's name is Sharon Burch. It worked. Burch developed testing methods that confirmed her findings. That is where things get interesting.

Science has long shown that intelligence is tied to what could generally be called synapse development. When the brain has the need to process more data than the existing wiring allows, it creates more. This creation of "wiring" begins during a person's childhood. Here is the epiphany. Let's consider this synapse development to be similar to band width. Doing what you can to increase this in a child's brain is like changing their thought processes from working like a dial-up Internet connection to high-speed broadband.

The secret here is to understand that learning happens when a stimulus directly affects one part of the brain. The challenge has always been how to get the largest number of brain areas to work together at one time. How do you cross the divides between different areas?

Generally speaking there are three functional activities that significantly promote synapse development, or in layman's terms, "brain wiring" to connect the different areas of the brain. The best known areas of study that require using different parts of the brain are; learning quantum physics, strategic games such as chess, and learning music. To clarify, learning music isn't just listening to music.

Science has known this for a long time. The music industry and music teachers have known this for a long time. But the problem has been that they had no effective ways to communicate the message effectively so people like you and I could understand it, and that many people do not have the means to buy instruments, pay for music lessons, or children's educational music programs. Enter the genius of Sharon Burch and her concept of Freddie the Frog Books.

Burch first spun a story that captured her student's attention. She tied it with a wonderful character she named Freddie the Frog and then she turned the concept into a series of children's books. To make it full proof, the books include an incredible audio CD with music and fun, dramatized narration so all the parent, child, grandparent or teacher has to do is play the CD and turn the pages. Suddenly, not only is learning music easy, but kids fall in love with Freddie the Frog.

Their desire to learn music because of their affection for Freddie, creates a beautiful outcome - smarter kids. While the children are learning music, their brains are creating bandwidth, wiring, connections or whatever you want to call it. Those connections don't go away. Later in life those connections allow faster processing of thought and analysis.

So think about this. When I went to school the smartest kids were in music. They were the band and choir people. The misconception was that they did music because they couldn't do sports. But there were always a few jocks that were also in music. They seemed to be top academic performers too. What if we consider the reverse and in fact in chronological order? Most of those academic stars were learning music before they were academic stars.

Sharon Burch may have stumbled onto the Holy Grail of learning. Much to the benefit of our next generation and those to follow, Burch built a system that is easy, economical, and most of all very beneficial to our children. It is easy to see Freddie the Frog as the world's mascot for learning music and Sharon Burch as the ambassador.