Homeschooling Basics – The Learning Styles and Early Childhood Development
HOMESCHOOLING, THE VISUAL WAY
Remember, our goal here is to identify what activities can stimulate your child’s visual learning capacity, and not focus on making your child a “purely” visual learner.
As you know, our kids employ a lot of learning styles.
It could be that your child will have a dominant learning style, such as visual learning, for example.
In most cases, a kid may be a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to learning styles—we use all our senses a lot, and almost all of the time we use them in conjunct with each other—so it definitely makes sense that we cannot always isolate whether we are purely learning the visual, auditory, or kinesthetic way.
However, it also makes sense that some parts of brain are more active and functional as compared to others, and these certain parts might have an effect as to how we learn things. Like when we train our visual muscles consistently to achieve a learning goal, for example—doing memory games, or learning a visual language such as sign language.
For this part, we would focus on the visual learning style, and share with you some activities that you can do as a deeply devoted homeschooling mom, (or at least in the making).
Your kid responds more to graphic or illustrated materials
I admit, it would definitely be hard to tell, especially with younger kids, such as my daughter.
Ever heard the saying that kids’ brains are like sponges? They absorb a lot! This means that their response to visual stimuli can be misinterpreted as them becoming primarily visual learners, but in reality, their eyes just get caught with anything that has color, or anything visually stimulating.
In that case, you can be creative in your own assessment.
Try a visual or a memory game…for instance, follow the steps below:
Show a picture of a duck, and other easy-to-identify animals, and tell her initially what those are called.
Show a silhouette of the same picture/s, those that are only outlining the shape of the animal you previously showed, and ask your baby to identify each.
If your kid can’t verbalize fully yet, ask them to match the picture to the silhouette and see the level in which they can do this accurately.
This is a simple test; inconclusive, but at least it will tell us about our kid’s level of retention or attention span when it comes to visual games.
So what if my kid is a dominantly visual learner?
If you truly suspect that your kid uses visual learning more efficiently than any other learning style, this will give you a very big hint regarding the approach you could do while homeschooling!
Believe me, it will come really handy once you encounter a lesson that your child will struggle with, because you can use her visual learning style as an anchor for teaching a new or difficult concept.
An anchor works in such a way that you utilize something that your child is familiar with, and use that to explain a different concept. For example, in teaching English as a Second Language, sometimes using her basic language or mother tongue will help you explain further or deeper what an English word means.
Using visual learning to teach a difficult concept
MATH! MATH! MATH!
Well, for some of us, Math is a difficult concept.
Teaching a young kid the concept of addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division could be difficult, that is why you will be needing a lot of visual anchors.
You can show your kid the numeric formula of a division equation, but imagine how hard it is for a young kid to understand which divides what, unless you show a picture or pictures of things that are being divided by something…
So instead of showing ONLY this…
2 / 8 = ?
Why not assist her further and show this?
Explore your child’s visual learning capacity
Let us hit two birds with one stone: explore and enhance.
With the following activities and constant practice, you will not only gauge the level of your kid’s skill in visual learning, you can also “exercise” her use of “visual muscles”…
Retention games – memory games, picture games, matching games, and the like will teach your kid to strengthen her visual acuity and recall capacity.
Consistency is key. Do this at least once a week as part of your weekly activities. This is fun and at the same time it helps your kid’s brain development.
Teaching new concepts using graphs, charts, or other illustrations to aid learning.
Aside from using just pure words on a textbook, spice up your learning activities by making it more colorful and visually stimulating.
Practicing using the environment – labeling things, colors, shapes, etc. This is very useful when you travel, or in keeping boredom away…
Your kid has to understand early on that everything has a name, and a lot of things that she sees has a story or a concept surrounding it.
Reading and writing – words are absorbed visually too! Encourage them to read a lot of books, can be with pictures in order to aid understanding.
Read a book together by pointing out at the words as you read them, so they can get familiar with the appearance of letters and words, and how they are used to form a sentence or a story. This could also improve the desire or the preference to read on their own.
In summary, the main point here is to keep a close eye on your child’s dominant learning style, and use that as basis if you think she will learn best using that learning style.
HOMESCHOOLING, THE AUDITORY WAY
Imagine you are a baby in your mother’s womb…
You see nothing, but can hear the swish of fluid all around you. You can hear a constant, rhythmic pounding of a heartbeat…
Now you are just born into the world, and all of a sudden you hear a myriad of unfamiliar noises, some of it pleasant, some are not.
As the days go by, you are soothed whenever you are at your mother’s bosom, or hear a soft, melodic music nearby.
Later on, you notice that people around you are opening their mouths and pleasant sounds are coming out, until you get to understand their meaning and try to copy those sounds that they are making.
And then you get to understand that these sounds are called voices, and these voices form a variety of words which has meaning, and you learn to use these words appropriately.
Suddenly, you figure out that everything has a name, so you point to each one and label them as your mother did, and then start communicating with your mother and father and feel that they understand you in their own way.
We are living in a world full of sounds and music, and it is unfair to shove those away and think that they are just part of the background.
Such is the experience of a kid who might be dominantly using an auditory learning style, and I fear that this type of learning style is much neglected, as is the case sometimes, unless we supermoms can do something about it…
Neglected, in the sense that some teachers whether in a traditional school or homeschool sometimes don’t really pay attention to quirks or mannerisms while discussing concepts, and those can be annoying to a person who is very skilled in utilizing their auditory mechanisms.
Imagine a speaker who, you know is very intelligent and has a lot of knowledge impart, but when the person is delivering a lecture, you seem to get distracted because of the repetitive use of uhm, alright, actually, or okay.
Just to prove my case further—ever see a kid or a person who gears their ear toward you when you discuss something that might be important to them, instead of looking at you directly?
Some say this is because they really want to hear more of what you’re saying, but some people might misconstrue this as not being attentive, or worse, rude.
Again, this is hard to spot, but I’m guessing that if you look carefully, at your kid for example, you can probably see some signs that she is very interested and invested in all things auditory.
How to check if your kid benefits most from auditory learning?
If we assess more closely, we might see that auditory stimuli helps them remember more or learn information better.
In such cases, you can do a simple test—again, inconclusive especially on younger kids, but doing these kinds of assessment will help you learn a new thing about your child, specifically about an effective way to teach concepts or sharpen her memory, or if she benefits more from a largely auditory way of teaching.
Either way, these are still fun activities that you can try at home, regardless if you want do an assessment with your kid or not.
Follow the steps below to see if your child has a very sharp sense of auditory accuracy:
Blindfold your kid and ask her to identify if you are clapping nearby or from afar; “near” and “far” will suffice as answers. (If your kid is not able to verbalize yet, proceed to the next item below)
Next, ask your kid to point out or watch her turn her head towards the direction where she hears the clap—make the directions, distance, and loudness varied, just like in a little auditory experiment where you can clap not just upward, downward, or to the sides, but everywhere in the vicinity.
Check the level of accuracy wherein she can identify the direction, distance, or loudness of your claps.
Optionally, ask your kid to try and repeat a series of claps or sounds that you did. Around 5 or more claps in a row would suffice. Observe if she is able to get the sequence correctly.
You can also try another common activity:
Say the name of different animals, and tell your kid what sound they make. (You can also vary this method by pointing to a picture of the animal—or an actual animal—and replicating the sound it makes).
Say the names again, for instance, say “duck” and see if she responds correctly, saying “quack quack”.
Reverse the questioning, say the sounds first then ask her what animal it is, e.g. say “meow meow” and see if she identifies the sound correctly.
Try this as many times as you like and check the percentage on which she answers correctly.
You can also try other sounds, such as different sounds of the alphabet and numbers, phonetics, etc.
Discussions are very helpful for auditory learners
You might think that your kids only love to listen to your voice and nothing else, but really, you might just find out that they are hanging on to every word that you say, because they are more engaged with the information when you’re saying it to them instead of just allowing them to read on their own.
Not that reading’s a bad thing, of course, but you can assist their learning by asking them to verbalize and discuss what they learned. You can also try and incorporate music a learning tool, and see if it helps.
There are plenty of other ways to enhance their auditory perception, and auditory-based activities can definitely help keep your homeschooling sessions more diverse and experiential.
If you want to learn more about auditory learning and other commonly used learning styles, check out my previous posts on this blog.
HOMESCHOOLING, THE KINESTHETIC WAY
More accurately, this part is about Kinesthetic and Tactile Learning, something that other supermoms would be a bit more familiar about.
Let’s get moving!
I’m really excited about this section, because of all the fun activities and stuff that we will surely get to experience with our kids.
Kids looooove to move, so how can we accurately know if our child is a kinesthetic learner?
Well, we can’t, at least not very accurately.
But, what we can do is check if your kid learns the information better when she is actually doing the task themselves, or if she can accurately label some things through touch. For instance, you can try these below:
Play a game called “Mystery box” where you will put some random stuff inside a box, things that you think are applicable to her level, or things that have a definite and identifiable shape. Learn if she will be able to identify the things accurately, and assess the level of accuracy and the quality of how she labels it. For example, place her block shapes inside and see if she can label each shape correctly.
Gauge how early she can start with fine motor movements, such as writing, pinching, drawing, grasping delicate objects, etc. Compare with other kids you know.
Check her level of energy or restlessness, how often she moves around the house, how quick she transfers from task to task, or if she is prefers doing more physical games/activities as opposed to doing sit-down activities such as reading, or watching TV while staying in one place the whole time, etc.
Of course, as a supermom, you have powers to be more creative in assessing your kid. Continuously try and observe if she uses movement or tactility while learning, like running around or jumping a lot while you are trying to quiz her about shapes or other lessons.
If she is overly active though, has a very short attention span, and gets distracted very easily, to the point that it makes you concerned, you can try asking for a more advanced assessment from an occupational therapist or pediatrician just to check if her being overly active is still healthy for a child her age.
Doing these basic checks, and seeing that movement and touch helps her to remember the lessons more accurately, you can then try to incorporate these activities into your homeschool lessons and see if she is more responsive to a kinesthetic and tactile way of teaching…
The Alphabet, and Fine Motor Skills
During one of our visits to the pediatrician, the doctor assessed my daughter’s fine motor skills by laying out rubber alphabet shapes, and asking her to pick the letters up using a tweezer, and to arrange them alphabetically in a line.
The doctor told me that this is a good activity to incorporate skill building in letters and at the same time training the hands to do finer movements.
At home, we do this from time to time, using not only the alphabet concept but incorporating it in other lessons such as arranging pieces according to size, length, texture, etc.
You can also try different activities to improve your kid’s fine motor skills, such as writing, drawing, using coloring books, painting or doing other artsy stuff for art tools and other products that you can use while homeschooling), practicing grasping and pinching, using spoon and fork properly while eating, etc. etc.
Math!
Again, who says Math is only used in paper or pictures?
I found out about this activity from another homeschooling supermom, wherein she incorporated the concept of addition and subtraction by playing with mini-plastic balls and a couple of baskets—“Shoot two balls in the basket and how much is the total” or “take away four balls and count how much is left”—well you get the general idea.
You can check out with other supermoms subscribed here in my blog for ideas, or you can be creative on your own way—the sky is the limit J
Hand-eye coordination
You can also teach your kid about her own movements, such as in hand-eye coordination, where you let her see where her hand goes, i.e. as in tracing her fingers or hand to the grooves of a spiral object.
This helps with “proprioception,” such a fancy term, I know, but it basically means that she will be able to get a good awareness on the position of the different parts of her body, and how much strength she expends in different movements.
Core Coordination and Spatial awareness
Kids do know how to dance even at a very young age, but I bet you can observe some kids who are real talented at dancing early on.
Enhancing your kid’s kinesthetic learning can involve teaching good, even slightly complicated body movements and seeing if she can get a groove on and manage memorizing the steps on her own—this could be applicable not only in dancing and sports but in other different kinds of activities as well.
I hope you enjoyed my in-depth post about the three most common learning styles, both in this article and the previous one.
Soooooo, supermoms—I am really excited to hear your stories about these different learning styles…Share them below so other moms can hear about your superpowers!
What topics would you like me to do next? I post a lot of basic and advance articles about homeschooling in blog,
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