Community Connection ~ August 3, 2025: Become More "Word Smart"

The school year has started out here in Arizona! We want to honor the return to structured learning (after all, we’re learning in less-official ways ALL THE TIME) by beginning a series centered around strengthening the different types of intelligence. We’ll follow the structure laid out in Thomas Armstrong’s book 7 Kinds of Smart (thanks Peggy D., for the gift of this book many years ago!). Today’s focus: “Word Smart.” 

“Word Smart” is also known as linguistic intelligence. It includes the ability to tell stories, to play with language, to use it to achieve our goals…all of the ways in which a facility with words can serve us. If you already consider yourself word smart, these activities will probably be relatively easy and fun for you. If this is an area with lots of growth potential for you, they might be more challenging, but will hopefully be just what you need to light up new parts of your brain! 

The book includes a multitude of activities to help you assess and bolster each type of intelligence; we’ll curate them for you as we go, but you can OF COURSE read the book yourself and try them all! The first one we’d like to share is a group activity centered around oral traditions. Gather together and consider what you could contribute to creating an oral tradition if you were all stranded somewhere without the ability to write anything down. Folks might offer things like jokes, memories, or synopses of favorite films - but consider starting with Bible stories. Think about which ones you could tell without needing to read them, and do it! Tell them with as much detail as you can, and focus on choosing your words with care. [Side note: after you complete this activity, let us know which stories you contributed to the oral tradition! As always, you can share with us in person or on Facebook or Instagram]

If you’re on a roll, you can continue becoming more word smart all by yourself by doing what Thomas Armstrong calls “tapping the word rivers.” It’s an ongoing process of generating and recording your thoughts as they flow through your mind. One of the prompts offered to help get started is just perfect for us: write about the closest you ever felt to God. Don’t plan your response, just present your brain with the prompt and start writing whatever comes to mind. Stop when you feel like you’re done. Return to this activity whenever you’d like, and let the words flow!

We’ll move through the other six “kinds of smart” over the next few months, exploring how to strengthen each one. As we go, we hope you’ll begin to see the beauty of the ideas underpinning the theory of multiple intelligences: that there are lots of different ways to be smart, that all of our brains are beautiful in different ways, and that even if you don’t identify with a particular type of intelligence, you do possess it, and you can always develop it further - no matter how many years out of school you are!