Finding Your Childs Learning Style
One decision that will help you on our journey through homeschooling is to start looking into the different learning styles. Parents teach and students learn in many ways, but learning can be grouped into a few main styles. Auditory, meaning learning best through hearing. Visual learners, who learn best through seeing, And kinesthetic learners who do best by moving, touching and doing. There is a variety of test available to find this out, but the best way to determine your child’s style is to get involved.
Watch how your child plays. Do they enjoy getting dirty and making a mess? This may seem like normal childhood behavior, but some kids tend to really enjoy it more than others. Learning about how water goes from a solid to a gas can be a really big mess, but a mess that will leave a lasting memory in your child mind. The decision to put an ice cube in a sauce pan and melting it to a boil or freezing a some food color and water and then exploding it in a microwave might just be a matter of the way you child store things in his memory. Kinesthetic learning is probably their style.
Does your child know every word to every song they hear? There are curriculums out there solely dedicated to learning through music. From multiplication tables and phonics to the life and times of Mozart. How many of us learned our alphabet though the famous ABC song? Auditory learners will probably absorb a lot through songs and music.
And what about the video that your child knows every scene of. Or maybe your child can tell you step by step how dad changes the ink cartridge on the printer even though they have never been taught how to do it. Maybe you have a visual learner.
Most people will learn something in each of these styles. But most children will show a particular inclination in one. And remember that this may change as your child grows. My oldest child was very kinesthetic when she was younger but has turned out to progress best through her workbooks. But it was a long change from one to the other. Part of this was because her motivation changed.
So whether you use questionnaire type testing to help you, or just observe you child’s play preference, learn how your child learns. It will make teaching them easier for you and more beneficial for them and less stressful for them both.