Do you know what kind of learner your child is? If you’re homeschooling, awareness of the different learning styles and understanding of how your child learns can be invaluable. If you consider learning style when choosing a curriculum or planning a lesson, you can make your teaching time more effective and make your child a happier student. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that even though one learning style may be dominant for your child, generally people learn through a combination of learning styles. The key is identifying which is the principle learning style for your child and using that knowledge to your advantage.
What are the different learning styles?
Auditory – Auditory learners do well hearing the information they are learning. People who are auditory learners do well in lecture-style classes and prefer having material read aloud than reading it themselves. Using music and song can be an effective teaching method for auditory learners.
Visual – Visual learners find the most benefit from reading information, looking at pictures, charts or graphs or watching a demonstration. Visual learners will often be easily distracted when listening to oral explanation.
Kinesthetic – Kinesthetic (or tactile) learners are the doers. They learn most effectively from hands-on experiences. Often kinesthetic learners are fidgety in learning situations geared more toward auditory or visual learners. Note taking can help fill the need to “be doing something” while in an auditory or visual learning scenario.
Why care about learning styles?
As I said before, people can learn in all three ways but we usually have a strong preference for one over the other two. Awareness of your child’s preferred learning style can help you choose method of delivery that will make the most of their school hours. If your child is primarily a visual learner, there’s no point in designing a lesson that’s heavily slanted toward auditory learners. It will take much longer for your child to learn the material and you’ll probably find that they’re distracted, bored or just plain frustrated in the process.
Tailoring lessons to your child’s learning style is one of the shining stars in terms of the benefits of homeschooling. In a traditional classroom setting teachers may try to incorporate all three learning styles in a lesson to serve their entire classroom, but sometimes it’s just not possible to hit the mark for every kid. You, on the other hand, can make sure lessons are as engaging as possible for your child.
How do you determine learning styles?
If your child is older, you can have him/her take this quiz to help determine learning style. If your child is too young to answer those questions, give some thought to situations where he/she was able to learn information quickly and effortlessly. Was he/she in an auditory, visual, or kinesthetic learning situation? Which type of situation seems to be dominant? Ask your child which type of lesson they would prefer. Would they rather have you read aloud or sing a song to learn something? Would they prefer looking at a picture book or watching an educational video? Or would they rather do an experiment or activity?
Putting your knowledge to use
Once you’ve determined your child’s learning style, start thinking of how you can use this knowledge to your benefit. My daughter is predominately a kinesthetic learner with visual being her second strongest preference. Math was always a struggle for her, so we sought out a math curriculum that makes heavy use of manipulatives and video examples to teach. Now, she catches on to math concepts quickly and retains them.
Ideas for auditory learners: reading aloud, taped audio presentations, conversation style discussion, vocal repetition for things that need to be memorized, songs that incorporate desired information, mnemonics, dramatic presentations or role-plays.
Ideas for visual learners: pictorial or graphic handouts, reading to accompany audio-based lesson, keep audio-based learning short (visual learners get bored and distracted when they have to listen for long periods of time), visual demonstrations, video lessons.
Ideas for kinesthetic learners: field trips, experiments, lessons translated to “real-life” situations that can be experienced, manipulatives, educational games, games/songs that incorporate movement, arts & crafts projects, notebooking.
