BrainMoves, Movement, and Learning for the New School Year
By: Diane Malik Published on: 30/08/2025The new school year is starting. Shoelaces half-tied, their backpacks jostling, everywhere across the United States, parents will send their children to the bus or drop them off for class in various states of energy, movement, and enthusiasm. School days create lasting memories for families. For parents, it means preparing children for a new year, while children make their own memories by exploring and learning through movement. Activities such as picking up toys, building with blocks, and solving puzzles demonstrate that hands-on movement is crucial for memory. Movement helps children remember and learn more effectively.
Developing Reading Skills: How BrainMoves can Help Pre-Readers in Preschool or Kindergarten and Dyslexic Children in Elementary School
By: Diane Malik Published on: 20/08/2025New Blog Post DescriptionBefore children learn to read, they progress through phases of understanding how written language works. First, they learn to speak, make sounds, and then form words that gain meaning. This lets preschoolers express complex thoughts and stories. By this stage, children are also more aware of present, past, and sometimes future events. However, patience and understanding of future events may still be developing. This is important because to read, children must learn that shapes mean sounds, sounds make words, and that written and spoken words share meaning.
“BAD” Parenting and “MISTAKES.” How BrainMoves can help YOU Parent Positively and be Kinder to Yourself + Three Parenting Tips
By: Diane Malik Published on: 07/08/2025Being a mother or father to a preschooler can feel like an impossible job. If it is your first child or your third, sometimes you may feel like you are one day before a complicated review and you forgot to hand in a work project or that you have been given a new role but have no onboarding for how it should happen. Of course, mistakes will happen. Your child is unique; you are unique. Every situation is unique. There is no guidebook. There’s also no black and white. Remember that part of childhood development is transitioning from black-and-white thinking into a more nuanced way of reviewing our world. When we’re stressed, we, as adults, can sometimes revert back to that childhood black-and-white thinking. What does this mean for parenting? You may feel a situation is disastrous: Maybe you’ve said the wrong thing and the child cried, you lost your temper, or maybe you forgot something important like a parent-teacher meeting or a doctor’s appointment. Perhaps you simply overcommitted yourself and you don’t feel “present.” In that moment it may feel like the exact opposite of what should have happened HAS happened and you feel guilty. Your brain could process this as “Oh, that was a mistake. That was BAD.”
5 Tips for Preparing for the New School Year
By: Diane Malik Published on: 02/08/2025Hi Diane, I have a preschooler headed to a full-day preschool for the first time this fall and a kindergartener who is returning to school. While the full-day preschool is fantastic, and my kindergarten student eventually loved it, the transition was hard last fall. What can I start doing now to help make my children’s transition from summer to school easier?
