Home Schooling and Your Child's Learning Style
Don't you wish you could figure out your child's learning style? Wouldn't it be nice to know how she processes and remembers information so you could buy and use just the right home school curriculum? Does she like to learn alone, or with others? Hands-on? Or think things through first?
What kind of learning assessment could help you find the specific answers you need to help your child enjoy learning and home schooling?
And, almost as importantly, what else do you need to do to make the most of the different learning styles in your family?
I have found some resources and steps that have proven helpful for us in our home school journey that I thought I'd pass on to you.
Steps:
- Take a learning styles assessment
to find out how your child learns and what kind of environment best encourages her learning.
The authors of the well-known book
Discover Your Child's Learning Style: Children Learn in Unique Ways - Here's the Key to Every Child's Learning Success
have created a very thorough learning style evaluation that is great for home schoolers. It includes not only talents, but also other aspects of learning such as interests, modality, environment, and disposition -- really key information for home schooling.
I personally came across Discover Your Child's Learning Style by Mariaemma Pelullo-Willis and Victoria Kindle Hodson when I was desperately trying to figure out what was causing all the tears and frustration with one of our four kids. It was a low point in our home schooling, I can tell you, and this book was a real God-send.
Their premise really makes sense to me, and I've seen how true it has been for us:
The one subject we don't study - ourselves - may be the basis for success in studying all the others.
I trust these authors because I have experienced that they know their stuff. Now I've come to find out that they have a website with all sorts of other helpful materials available on-line. I am so impressed with what I have seen so far. They are experts and I am eagerly learning all I can from them and their Learning Success Institute.
Tips:
The Learning Success Institute has given me permission to give you a special $5 home school discount off of their
Self-Portrait On-line Learning Style Profile.
This could be one of the most important purchases you make for your home school, so I highly recommend it before you buy lots of other home school curriculum or other materials. Since it is an on-line assessment, you can get the results right away. Take it today and try it out tomorrow.
- Learn about how you interact as a parent with your child. Knowing our child's learning style is just one part of the picture; knowing how you as a parent relate and deal with your child is another important part. Sometimes we can respond negatively to certain characteristics we see in our children without even realizing it. Having another impartial set of eyes look at how we interact with our children can really help clarify family dynamics.
For instance, one of my daughters is very tactile and I used to get so annoyed when she would come up and touch everything I was working on. It really helped our relationship when I realized that my critical attitude to her natural curiosity was a big part of our problem.
Tips:
I found that learning about learning styles and temperment types was very helpful in understanding how to work with my child instead of against my child. Here are some real classics that I really recommend and re-read myself to gain perspective:
- Find out what your learning style is. That's right, your learning style. We often forget that we tend to teach in the way we learn best. If we like hands-on projects or are distracted by music, we may be tempted to think our child is the same way. So we may spend lots of time thinking up a project for our child to do, only to have her not appreciate it because it just isn't her primary learning style. Or perhaps you've been insisting that your son not listen to background music because it would be distracting to you. However, it very well might help your son do his math if he works well in that environment.
Another example of the importance of knowing your own learning style came to me in an "aha" moment just the other day. In re-reading the above I realized why I prefer the way Tapestry of Grace is laid out compared with Sonlight Home School Curriculum
. Sonlight is a great curriculum, but I found that I liked seeing more of the big picture and how the pieces fit into an overarching theme. No wonder because I'm a strong Global Thinker! So now I can understand why one curriculum didn't work for me as well as another!
You may find "aha" moments, too, as you learn about your own learning style -- hopefully before you buy your next home school curriculum!
Tips:
Take a
learning profile for yourself
. You'll hear yourself saying, “Oh, so that's why I want her to do her work that way, because I'm like that!” and “Now I know why it bugs me when she wants to…”
- Find resources that are made specifically to work well with your child's learning style. There are loads of materials out there. You can look around, but if you'd rather save the time searching on the Internet to be with your kids, check out the resources at
Learning Success Institute. Some of the materials they offer are:
- A math program for learning those pesky multiplication facts based on rhymes, jingles, and activities to help all modalities of learners,
- A spelling program, Spelling: Weird Words, which they have created especially for tactile-kinesthetic learners. I wish I'd known about this when one of my kids was just starting out to learn all those “exceptions” to the rules!
- Materials for struggling writers, money management courses and career guides for kids.
- What To Do When They Don't Get It: A Guide To Great Teaching Techniques (including their Information Mapping technique),
- Young People's Guide to Goal Setting (written by an executive coach but written for kids), and their
- Homeschooling Manual & Curriculum Guide.
I haven't used all of these, but they sure sound great! Check out the Learning Success Institute.
Other suggestions just to get you started would include:
If you have any other suggestions for home school curriculum for various learning styles, please feel free to Contact Us.
As I think about learning styles and my children, I try to keep in mind that God made each of us unique for a reason. That simple idea has helped me be able to affirm my children and see what is good in them rather than become overly frustrated with them. I pray that all of us will be able to see our children more and more as God does, and help them grow in the ways He wants them to.
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