Giovanna Spantigati

Project - development of children's 8 intelligences

Project for parents with their children.

The goal is that parents work on the understanding and development of their children's 8 intelligences.
First of all it is important to underline that parents should not substitute teachers, but they can work in parallel with school. They should collaborate with school to help their children at home and for the education for life. Yet, I don't mean helping with their homework. What I mean is parent should work on a different field, on different sectors.

The first step is the exploration pathway. Observation, then, is at the basis. At this level it is important that parents do not interfere. Even if it takes time and patience, parents should observe children without prejudices, le them conquer, make mistakes, fall, get, loose and wonder without doing anything at all. This requires a lot of self-control and time, but it is something we can do day by day and the entry point can be simple, normal daily situations.

Besides the observation I would suggest some exercises and games to play at home with parents and other children (sisters, brothers or friends). These games are a good entry point for the observation and also help to strengthen the intelligences.

- Spatial, logic, kinesthetic intelligences: ask your child to use his imagination. One good example: "Imagine you are going to school by car with your mum. Suddenly the car stops. Mother realizes there is no fuel left (or one wheel is broken). What happens, then? How can you go to school?"

- Spatial, logic, kinesthetic for small children: when a baby is left in his box to play, see what happens. The baby will try to reach his games (puppets and what else) and will try to get up to reach the upper side of the box. While trying, the child will fall and cry. What happens to parents, then? If his mother helps him the child will grow without self-confidence, looking for pity. If his mother just shows him all the possible ways, he will experiment by himself and grow in his intelligences.

- Kinesthetic: for small children: ask your child to pay attention to his body, to let him observe how his body moves, works, breaths.
- Spatial, kinesthetic: ask your child to remember and then tell (or draw) all the objects which are in one room of the house, for instance the kitchen.

- Musical: training for the music. Ask your child to recognize different sounds. There are many exercises which could be done: ex: recognize and imagine domestic sounds (laundry, clock, pc, etc.). imagine to hear the sound of a bell; then 2, then 3 bells. Concentrate on the birds singing.

- Logic, interpersonal: when your child asks a question turn the question on him: ex: "Why is it so?" Say: "What do YOU think?" And ask him (for instance while watching tv news, commenting someone's fact), how he would solve a problem if he were in someone else's mind.

- The other senses:
Taste: ask your child to imagine to taste different foods: sour, salty, sweet, bitter, and consequently to feel the reaction of the body. For instance, if you imagine to taste a lemon, your salivation grows, and this is the beginning of psychosomatic.

Smell: ask your child to pay attention to all the smells and perfumes and then to imagine pleasant and unpleasant smells.

Feeling: on hands and feet. Ask your child to imagine to take off his shoes and socks and to walk on the sand and imagine the feeling, then to imagine his feet entering into the water (another example: feet moving on the lawn). For hands: tell your child to imagine to take different objects, made of different material and feel the differences. Imagine to stroke a cat, a dog, to touch the sand. Imagine to put hands under hot, cool, lukewarm water.

-kinesthetic: work on perceptions: help your child to learn to recognize when his body is (for instance) tired. Ask your child to imagine to feel his body light, heavy, and so on.

- kinesthetic, inter, intra: massages to establish a connection with one's body. Teach your child to make massages on his body in order to feel and recognize the needs of his own body and in a second time teach him how to make massages to others in order to learn to feel the needs of the others.

-intrapersonal: ask your child to do exercises taken from the Mandala images. Draw a circle on the floor with the 4 cardinal points on it: north, east, south, west. Put the child in the middle of the circle. Ask the child: who is in the centre? What is your feeling, your thought, your emotion toward it? The purpose is to help the child to be centered. And also: build a labyrinth to help him to get into the centre. This helps because making the attempt to look for our identity we risk of getting lost.

-Interpersonal: role-play exchange (psychodrama). Ask your child to play the teacher. This also helps the child to solve the meaning of authoritarianism. Ask the child to play the mother and vice versa: "Now you are mom and I (mom) am you." Let the child talk, behave the way the sees you. This helps him to understand you much better and shows you the way he looks at you. Vice versa: your child will see how he looks like when you behave like him. This can also be very helpful to solve conflicts. Ask your child to play his brother (sister) or other people and vice versa.

- Linguistic: see what changes in the communication, in the language, according to the different moods. Observe and ask your child to see what happens when he is tired, angry, happy, anxious, etc. see the changes in the communication observe what your child prefers and uses the most: adjectives, verbs, nouns, adverbs. Ask him to say the same thing in many different ways.
Semantic: for the very simple words explain their meaning, their origin and for some words, explain that, in the beginning, the same word could have had a totally different meaning.
Observe the speech: if it serious, humorous, aggressive, relaxing, which means to observe the feelings that come out of his speech.
Linguistic: make them play crossword.

- Naturalistic: when going out to the country-side on Sundays for picnic and trips with the family ask your child to collect flowers, stones, leaves. When you go back home you can put them in a box and make a game like for instance to ask him to close his eyes, put his hand in the box and see if he recognizes what he takes.
At the end of the day, parents should keep a diary, like a dossier, in order to write and note every step. This can be very useful as time goes by. Before going to bed, parents could make a meditation, where they could visualize all the behaviors in the 8 intelligences: see how they came out and in which different ways. At the end of the meditation parents should imagine their child with all the intelligences working together in harmony. To observe the reality and to imagine potentialities coming out is a deep stimulus which makes the intelligences grow and develop. This produces in one parent a positive, dynamic, constructive attitude. This difference works deep down inside the person, because also when we stop our meditation our brain will keep on working. And, this happens also while sleeping. I am sure that at night we go to the school of life.

(This project has been developed for the University of Harvard in collaboration with Giorgio Fresia)

The Multiple Intelligences Theory- Sources:
"Frames of mind: The theory of Multiple Intelligences" - Howard Gardner - 1983
"Multiple Intelligences. The theory in practice" - Howard Gardner 1993
www.pz.harvard.edu