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| How Kids Learn: What’s your child’s learning style? |
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It is not easy to change the way you learn, and one way isn’t necessarily better than any other. However, you can use your understanding of how your child learns to find ways to enhance your child’s learning process. There are basically three ways that people learn – Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic. However, there are also two more styles of learning that have some similarities with the 3 basic styles – Verbal and Tactile. Verbal learners need to put everything into language. They need to take notes in order to understand lessons clearly, and they tend to rephrase what they hear, not just to check that they understood what was transmitted but also to translate the information into ‘their own language’ that they can understand. Most people are verbal learners. Visual learners make pictures of things in their heads. They draw on the whiteboard while they talk, they jot down symbols for things on their notepads, they think in terms of a timeline rather than a list of dates. Visual people find patterns on pages. While verbal people are happy to have something new described to them, Visual learners need to be shown. Visuals give directions by landmarks and don’t necessarily know the names of the streets or programmes or methods. Tactile learners need to touch things. They need to handle and try things rather than have it described or shown to them. Tactiles are quite likely to take things apart in order to see how they work (do you have a child who does this??) and they’ll insist on ‘showing’ you how something works rather than telling you about it. Tactiles learn early to be intuitive about how things work because, for the most part, learning in school is usually oriented towards Verbals and Visuals. Kinesthetic learners need to manipulate things. These are the people who need to take two things and add them to two other things to know that there are four things. Kinesthetic learners like to take physical objects and change them. Kinesthetics often have the hardest time in school because they need to make the changes to words and objects themselves rather than watching the teacher do it. People who are Kinesthetic are almost always also Tactiles. Aural learners remember everything they have heard or read. These learners often seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge, and can remember something they heard many years ago. Once an aural learner learns something, they will remember it. It is not easy to tell someone’s learning style simply by listening to them or reading what they write. Many people also have a combination of learning styles, rather than one main style. However, by noticing how your child responds in an activity or learning session over a period of time, and by talking to the child’s teachers, you can have an understanding of your child’s main learning style, and support your child’s learning at home in ways that suit his or her style. For example, to teach a kinesthetic learner basic addition and subtraction, handling number blocks may be more helpful than simply explaining the concepts using pen and paper. When teaching a visual learner, you may need to create drawings to explain what you mean. You may wish to check this website for a simple test that can you better understand you or your child’s learning style: http://people.usd.edu/~bwjames/tut/learning-style/
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Have you ever wondered why some people are so ‘quick’ to catch verbal explanations while others need some hands-on DIY or detailed visual demonstrations before they can grasp the concept? People learn in different ways which are not immediately obvious, and teachers don’t always address all the ways in school.