Double Doodles

Are you familiar with Brain Gym?  If you look it up on Wikipedia, this is what you'll find:  "Brain Gym is a program involving a sequence of activities believed to improve academic performance. The 26 Brain Gym activities are claimed to foster eye teaming, spatial and listening skills, hand-eye coordination, and whole-body flexibility, and so activate the brain for optimal storage and retrieval of information."  Find the Wikipedia link here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym
The official Brain Gym site can be found here:  http://www.braingym.org/

I personally have been to a 3 day workshop and have had training in Brain Gym, and I use several of the 26 activities with my students quite a bit.  A couple of the activities that I like to use is "Double Doodles," and "Lazy Eights." These 2 activities promote bilateral coordination.  Kids who have difficulty with bilateral coordination have difficulty using 2 hands or the 2 sides of their bodies together. You might also notice that they have trouble crossing midline (the imaginary line running down the center of your body), or that they do not have an established hand dominance (they switch hands frequently).  These activities encourage the integration of the left and the right sides of the brain, and the integration of coordination between the 2 sides of the body.  These activities are beneficial for all students, regular ed and special ed, learning issues or not.  For today's post, we will look at "Double Doodles" a bit closer.

Double Doodles is a 2 handed drawing activity that involves doodling or drawing with each hand at the same time.  The activity is most often done on a vertical plane (chalk board/white board or on a large piece of paper on the wall), but can be done on a table top as well.

• Draw a line down the center of the paper, or draw a vertical line on the board. Have the child stand or sit directly in front of that line so that it correlates to the middle of their body.
• With a marker, piece of chalk, etc in each hand with each hand on either side of the line, have the child begin drawing with both writing utensils at the same time, drawing the same lines/shapes/doodles simultaneously on opposite sides of the paper. 
• Encourage them to keep each hand on the right and left sides of the midline, never crossing the center line with either writing implement.  Eyes should be straight ahead.

This little guy really struggles with crossing midline-  you can see that he is also having a tough time moving both sides of his body in the same direction at the same time, and is having a hard time keeping each hand on each side of the midline on the paper.  

Double Doodles addresses the coordination of the 2 sides of the body together, promotes body awareness/orientation in space and incorporates the kinesthetic sense (proprioception, or the feeling of where your body is in space).  It is also thought to assist with improvement of directionality of letter formation.  

This child clearly has developed good bilateral integration skills.
(Photo courtesy of Rebecca Foster, OTR/L, used with permission)