Creativity, according to the left-brain, right-brain dominance theory, is best at expressive tasks. Often associated with emotions, music, color, images, and intuition, a person is often labeled, "right-brained" when they are in more creative fields. The more logical, critical thinking, numbers and reasoning are attributed to the left brain. Accountants, engineers and math based people are often thought to be "left brained".

That said, I’m going to go back to the value of reading and how parents can facilitate their children to learn how to read, and knowing how your child learns can be a great help. Are they left brained? Loves math, but won’t watch Mary Poppins with you? Or, right brained? Is intrigued by a kaleidoscope and tries to put the images he sees onto paper? While a good balance of the left and right brain function is optimal, I’ve noticed in my children that they appear to be more "right-brained". So, when my son was introduced to reading, I used this knowledge to my advantage.

I think reading is a gauntlet to a world; whether learning facts that can enrich understanding, or unfolding a mystery world within where a person can create and weave their own translations and images out of words. I wanted to instill a love of reading, and having my children read properly before any bad habits set in was important to me. As I said, having "right-brained" children, homework was often a challenge in our household but I thought when reading was REALLY embraced, then homework can take on a new meaning. Mathematics withstanding.

While my son has had his share of music lessons, painting classes, and we would spend hours doing arts and crafts together, I saw him slowly gravitating towards video games. I see worth in video games as a parent, and handled with balance, it doesn’t have to be the root of all evil. I decided then that I would incorporate some sort of entertaining material with an interactive component when teaching him to learn to read.

I went on line with this concept and came across a number of reading programs for kids. Phonics made the most sense to me and it corresponds to my school’s core curricula. What is phonics? Phonics is the relationship between letters and sounds, and the combinations of those letters have a corresponding sound (very simply put). It’s there that I came across Looney Tunes Phonics. I took a double-take; my son loves the characters from Looney Tunes – Taz, Bugs, Wile E. Coyote, and on and on, and there it was, on line phonics with all the characters!

I tried out their free lesson, and found myself transported to my TV set long ago at the breakfast table watching morning cartoons with these characters growing up and I loved it. Will my son? I could not wait until he got home to introduce him to the program. He loved it too. It integrates a reward-type system where after a learning session, he’s "rewarded" with an animation clip. It had all the components of his "right-braininess" (the music, color, images), and he was learning to read.

A major plus beyond the reading program itself, was that it was truly affordable. It’s not a CD ROM so everything is contained on line by them and I had no downloading from any CDs. There is the greatest progress report that we can look over together to see how well he did, or didn’t do. Lessons can be repeated, and so far, so good. My son sort of took it on and rarely do we even have to repeat a lesson. So, parents out there, whether your child is left brained, or right brained, this looks like a program for anyone!