At the age of 4, the teachers of Paz de Ziganda identify children with some difficulty in language, attention... so that later the doctor in neuroscience, María López, can see them. The Spanish López is a specialist in the development of children’s brains and comes to the Atarrabia school every year: He sees the children when they are 4 years old at the beginning of the school year; he returns at the end of that school year to find out if they have made any improvements with the advice and exercises that he has given them; and he returns when they are 5 years old to analyze the results of their evolution. A total of three times, when making the leap to Primary, to reading and writing, so that what was a minor difficulty does not become a serious problem. “Our treasure is that Mary identifies very well what happens to the child, which is the starting point for personalized attention. It is a great advantage for teachers because they often do not know exactly what the problem is, and Maria immediately clarifies it,” says Iñaki Erroz, director of the school.

To begin with, López analyzes the physiological development of the child, that is, if he has health problems. If vegetations or mucus cause hearing problems, if the problem of the student who does not pay attention is not that he takes too much sugar, chocolate, Coca-Cola..., if the respiratory coordination is to blame for the difficulty of speaking... Once it is confirmed that there are

no physiological problems, the neuroscientist analyzes the sensory area, that is, if the child is well connected to the world in the fields of vision, hearing and touch. If you have any problems with your vision, you will not paint with satisfaction; if you do not listen, you will be disconnected and will not understand the rules of the teacher; and if you have tactile problems, for example if you are hyposensitive to pain, you will take blows without even realizing it, you will be clumsy, you will want to touch everything and you will have problems to paint or write. As we will see later, it is not a question of whether you see, hear, touch, but whether what you see, hear, and touch is well processed and internalized by the brain.

The last step would be physical; study the child's psychomotricity. Do you have the right resources for coordination, balance, body posture, body positioning in space, eye and hand coordination?...
In the words of López, it is important to ensure that the information that enters the brain has the best possible quality, because at this age all the sensory systems of the child are developing: “I’m not worried about intellectual development, I’m looking at all of the above for that development to happen, the fundamentals. If the brain is well organized, it will be easy to develop intellectually, the learning process, and if it is not, it will be difficult.”

How to recognize “obstacles” in the brain?

 

Maria
Lopez performs neurofunctional assessments to determine if the child has brain development that corresponds to her age. For example, if a child lies his head on the table to draw, he may be erasing a field of view because he sees moving images because he does not coordinate the left and right eyes (the two fields of view) well: “It’s like one leg kicks the other while walking, one eye kicks the other, or one eye goes to one side and the other to the other, or jumps, or one faster than the other...” In relation to vision and motor skills, the child may have immature eye motor movements that he/she will have to work on in order to keep track of things with his/her eyes and not with his/her whole body or neck, otherwise he/she will end up reading moving the whole body.

Hearing, on the other hand, is mounted in the brain as a radio, and is the first thing the child must learn to turn on and off his hearing. Some children turn it on and off without knowing very well when, they have the button disconnected in the room and do not listen to the teacher. Others have trouble finding the sound source because we have to look for the source in the 360-degree area, but the view takes 120 degrees. For example, if we have the teacher behind us and we have difficulty identifying whether his voice is from the left or from the right, more time is wasted in determining it and information is lost. Volume control is also important: hyposensitive people need to speak higher than normal, while hypersensitive people – those who start crying right away in noisy places – need to speak lower. In case of problems filtering sounds, they will not be able to exclude sounds that do not interest them and focus on the teacher's voice: “Of all the auditory and visual stimuli that exist in the classroom with the teacher, the child must stay with the clipboard, but if he does not know what is important and what does not separate, everything will enter his mind, a lot of sounds, and that is chaos, a lot of unorganized information. This will cause the child to turn off the ‘radio’ directly on his head when he can no longer do so, or the information he has received will also come out: much and unorganized. My job is to make sure that the information input is delivered in the

most organized way.” María López wanted to make it clear that she does not work with the eyes or ears, but with what the eyes and ears send to the brain. “Sometimes parents or teachers suspect that the child does not see well, take him to the ophthalmologist who tells them that he has nothing. It has nothing in the eyes, but that does not mean that the brain does its job well, the images will be well perceived by the eye, but the visual attention, the way of perceiving the space, the visual memory, the connection between seeing and hearing... may be wrong. The problem may be in the processing of information and the brain has to train that.” But in what way?

Once the problem is detected, what to do?

 

A
stimulation program is prepared in two directions: on the one hand, group exercises in the classroom (such as psychomotricity), and on the other hand, each child in the home has his or her own lance (such as specific visual stimulations). To determine these second ones, López meets with the parents of each child seen. In addition, each academic year offers a conference in Paz de Ziganda: one for parents and one for teachers.

In fact, teachers have received training in this area and the exercises that are carried out in the classroom involve all students in Early Childhood Education, every day. Thus, it is not uncommon in Paz de Ziganda to find children walking on four legs to stimulate their vision. In this way, they can show if they have a good visual convergence in the distance to the ground and work on this convergence so that they are comfortable in the visual distance that the child will need to read later. Related to hearing, they have a special program: with a machine, they filter children on multiple frequencies in ten different volumes to analyze not how much they listen, but how they listen. The device allows the student to train or stimulate the hearing. “Changing the teacher’s chip has been important; in fact, a 4-5 year old boy wants to learn, to know the world, is stimulated and it’s hard to be lazy at that age. So if he doesn’t, it will be because he has a problem because he’s not comfortable studying,” explains Gemi Sorabilla, the school’s counselor.

The project was launched ten years ago and has been heavily invested and committed to it. “We have always had support groups, but for example if the student read poorly, we gave him more to read, and we started working on the stimulation program in order to get to the root of the problem. In fact, support is usually placed in information outlets, because when a student has problems in his studies, they are seen at the exit: he reads badly or speaks, he has difficulties in writing... but the problem is really in the information entry, how the student hears, sees, how he moves”, emphasizes Sorabilla. Paz de Ziganda has more than 1,000 students, about 150 of whom are 4 and 5 years old, of whom María López usually sees about 15 children a year – as well as some from outside the school, at the request of their parents. With this initiative, they have achieved very good results: the rate of brain development of the majority of children who receive Madrileños is 70-80% - 100% would be ideal - and after treatment it is 95-97% on average. There are, of course, more serious developmental problems with which we continue to work in Primary Education, rather than intellectually, stimulating the brain.

The importance of prevention

 

If we lay the foundations for a good brain development, we have done a tremendous job, and doing it in 0-6 years is essential, because that is when our brain has the greatest flexibility. The difficulties mentioned can also be corrected when they are more mature, but it is much more complex because it is not the same to adopt the brain when it is at the best moment of its development, or when things are already organized and “decided”. López tells us that the vast majority of young people who have not obtained the Compulsory Secondary Education degree have not been able to do so either because they have suddenly become foolish or rebellious, but because they have had difficulties since they had to face the first number or letter. “They are children who never learned to read well, who suffered a lot during their childhood, and the ball gets bigger and bigger.” And outside of education, the basis for other problems may also be there. The doctor believes that many cases of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder are associated with childhood development. For all these reasons, prevention is essential.