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“The time is now to forge strong alliances between brain science and education to work to inform best practices at home, school, and in the community” – Society for Neuroscience
The Kids’ Quests Brain Building Programs are different from skills-based learning programs because they bridge brain-science advances regarding learning, intelligence, and early childhood development with educational advances. These programs build upon pathways and functions that are needed to develop intellectual potential, learning, literacy, and relationships.
Our staff guides children through activities to develop alertness/attention, sensory, motor, speech, language, mood, social, and executive planning-thinking functions. These programs promote children’s esteem, learning, and intelligence, guiding adaptation to the environment and success for home, school, and beyond.
The Journey for Knowledge: Developing Intelligence
Intelligence is much more than IQ. Brain science advances have demonstrated that children can build upon the brain cells they are born with, having the potential to develop trillions of connections throughout the brain and body.
Intelligence involves brain connections that develop a child’s ability to:
- Focus, sustain, and switch attention
- Receive, analyze, and develop executive thinking and reasoning
- Regulate emotions and develop social skills
In the Intelligence Quest, your child will participate in fun neuroscience-based activities that foster the following skills
Optimal Learning
The Journey for Knowledge helps develop “relaxed alertness”; the ability to sustain attention and switch attention at a calm regulated pace. This helps children learn to follow directions, transition easily, and promotes intellectual potential.
Let me Hear your Voice
The Journey for Knowledge is designed to strengthen receptive and expressive language, including oral and written language. Speech, language, and memory skills are fundamental to prepare your child for success.
Memory Power
As the instructor and your child talk about the tasks they are learning, your child is building upon the ability to develop internal speech and language. The interplay between external and internal speech builds memory, language, and comprehension. It strengthens your child’s ability to think and organize and promotes their ability to recall and reflect.
Adapting and Relating to the Environment
The Journey for Knowledge builds upon your child’s ability to regulate mood, adapt to changing environment, and relate with others. The development of well-regulated and modulated mood is core to all brain development.
Motor Skills Matter
Brain connections involving movement pass through all sensory pathways and aid attention, language, memory and mood skills. Your child has fun with programs that build upon right/left coordination, balance, and sensory integration that promote their intellectual development.
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Reading Rangers & The Write Stuff: Literacy, Reading and Writing
This quest builds upon brain processes needed to develop literacy, reading, and writing skills. Your child will learn skills to become efficient readers, writers, and thinkers.
Your child’s ear-brain connections, eye-brain connections, and motor-brain connections help them receive and express the sound, visual, and motor symbols of letters, numbers and words.
READ-READ-READ: Involve children in reading from their first days of life. Talking with children about what is being read helps them develop critical thinking and analysis skills and planning skills. Play with language through story telling, puppet animation, song, and dance. Encourage children to learn letters of the alphabet, to discriminate different letter sounds, to discriminate different visual images of letters, and to write letters and words.
Our staff guides your child through neuroscience-based activities to build necessary functions for literacy, reading, and writing:
- Visual, auditory, and motor attention and reception of the alphabet code
- Phonics/Sound Symbol awareness
- Visual-spatial skills: Sight/Symbol awareness
- Line tracking: Visual/Motor skills
- Controlling the speed of eye and hand movement
- Horizontal and vertical eye gaze
- Combined sound-sight-tactile awareness
- Sensory (auditory, visual, tactile) memory of letters, numbers, and words
- Correct posture that promotes reading and writing
- Light-dark glare
- Eye guiding hand when writing, Eye guiding head when reading
- Relaxed alertness
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The Beat Goes On: Reading and Writing with Music
Music is a pleasurable way for children to experience language. It stimulates multiple brain areas and sets the stage for learning and thinking.
“Music is the literature of the heart; it commences when speech ends.” –
Alphonse DeLamartine
In The Beat Goes On, music is used to:
- Develop listening skills to become active listeners
- Focus and sustain attention
- Develop memory of phonics, words, sentences, and visual symbols
- Develop rhythmic speech – sound perception of the alphabet code
- Develop rhythmic sight – symbol perception
- Develop rhythmic tactile awareness of letters
- Use of rhyme and rhythm for memory development and to help reading aloud
- Encourage social bonds
- Develop balance and right/left coordination and written language
- Encourage vocabulary
- Develop concept formation
- Develop thinking and planning
- Develop a sense of ease and calm
- Enjoy reading and writing and having fun with literacy
Improvisation, Rhythm, Folk Songs, Pitch, Accompaniment, Listening
“Students trained in music score higher on standardized tests compared with non-musically trained peers.”
-Journal of Psychology of Music
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Friends and Feelings: Building Relationships, Self-Esteem and
Social Skills
The Friends and FeelingsQuest builds upon:
- Identification of Feelings: reading emotional faces, identifying appropriate emotional expression
- Conversation Skills: conversing with peers, attending to others, asking and answering questions
- Relationships: exploring peer and family relationships, forming and maintaining new relationships
- Self-Esteem: using positive self-talk, assertiveness, increasing belief in one’s abilities
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Scheduling Information
Please contact the Center to schedule your child’s enrollment in the Kids’ Quest Program. Hour long individual or group sessions are available. Parents are welcome to create their own groups (siblings and friends are welcome). Limit 4 children per group and ages must be compatible. Programs are offered Monday-Friday and some Saturdays.
- For optimal results, close sequencing of several sessions is recommended
- A parent/adult must remain at the center during the child’s Quest session
- Multiple sessions require pre-registration and payment
Screenings administered by licensed professionals are available upon request:
Ages 3 - 8:
Brain Building screenings: auditory, visual, and tactile perceptual tests
Ages 4 and +:
Computerized visual attention tests
Ages 6 and +:
Computerized visual and auditory attention tests, literacy fundamentals tests, IQ screenings
Kid’s Quest Workshops
Kids’ Quests Brain Building Workshops are also offered to school districts, health/allied health professionals, libraries, and interdisciplinary organizations that are committed to child development and learning. Workshop programs are fun, easy to use, and can be readily adapted within classrooms, early childhood programs, and homes
“The interactions among children, adults, and successful peers are powerful sources of a child’s learning.” - Vygotsky
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