Working With My Kids’ Learning Styles

Posted by Catherine | 0 comments

I grew up going to school every day and learning what I was told to learn in whatever way the teacher chose to present it. Thankfully for me, I learn easily in most modalities. It wasn’t until my husband and I were homeschooling our kids that we realized just how important learning styles are for kids being academically successful. In school, teachers often use multiple modalities to try to make sure all learning styles are covered and help kids succeed. At home, we have the “luxury” of being able to work with our kids individually.

My daughter learns very much like I do – she retains lots of details presented visually or audibly. This is a great advantage in many situations. She tends to be above “grade-level” in many subjects. The disadvantage is that she gets pretty easily bored. She doesn’t like going over the same material more than once.

My son, on the other hand, is very different from me. His educational experience is completely foreign to me. First of all, he has dyslexia. For eighteen months, he had weekly sessions with a tutor using Orton-Gillingham methods to help him learn to read. At ten, he still struggles to read. Spelling is a great mystery to him. We are working slowly through All About Spelling, which is great for him since it uses multiple senses for teaching. Second, he is a very auditory learner, which means that, even when he reads well on his own, I will probably do a good bit of reading out loud to him. When I learned to read, I was instructed to read quietly to myself from the very beginning. My son needs to hear things so he does better when he read out loud. In math, he often talks himself through problems out loud.

What are some of the practical implications of understanding my kids’ learning styles? My kids need different amounts of repetition. Last year, we were learning Bible verses together, and I found that my daughter knew the verse by the end of the first day, but my son sometimes still didn’t know the verse completely by the end of the week. My son needs me to read something to him from a couple of different sources, while my daughter gets rather bored by it. I try to help this by encouraging my daughter to have something to do with her hands while I’m reading so that the repetition doesn’t bother her quite as much.

My son loves workbooks. Doing the same thing over and over really helps him to learn. He also likes seeing the pages go by. My daughter dislikes workbooks, especially when they are repeating a topic. There are times, though, when she finds them helpful. She liked doing Easy Grammar because she learned a topic and doesn’t have to go back and do a grammar workbook or worksheets each year. I do, though, have her review the relevant sections in her grammar book when I find punctuation or grammar mistakes in her writing.

Both of my children love listening to books, either read by me or my husband or audiobooks on mp3. I attribute this to the fact that they both learn well by listening and they both love stories. Our curriculum, Sonlight, helpfully includes vocabulary lists and comprehension questions to go with the reading, but we almost never use them. This is because we have developed the habit of discussing books throughout the day as well as during reading time. Sometimes, the person reading will stop and ask what others think is going to happen next or what a character is thinking. We periodically ask a question or two to make sure that they understand the geography and history of the book or a new word. It’s amazing, though, what they pick up from context.

My son also has some ADHD attributes that make schooling a bit of a challenge. Spelling lessons take about 50% longer than expected because he is constantly making up sentences with the words or just talking about them. When he is doing sit-down work, he is easily distracted anything – the cat walking through the room, a bird outside. I have found that he does much better if I sit at the table with him. He also needs plenty of time doing physical things. During the winter, if it’s too cold to play outside, I have him walk on the treadmill. Otherwise, I “kick” him outside for at least 30 minutes of physical activity.

My daughter is getting older and more independent, so I give her a good bit of leeway in choosing her weekly writing assignments. I also try to keep the formal school day short enough that she has time to follow her interests. Right now, she’s into coin collecting. Since she is such a quick study, I don’t have her do formal vocabulary or comprehension questions with her reading. I can tell from discussion and her writing if she understood what she needed to.

My kids are quite different from each other but we use the same core curriculum with both of them. Some curricula are clearly better for certain kinds of learners, but I have found that I can modify Sonlight with minimal effort to complement my kids’ learning styles. I then choose supplementary materials based on their needs.

Because my kids are individuals and learn differently, it is quite important for me to have appropriate expectations for each child. My son is not ready to read the readers with Sonlight Core 6, so I adjust his reading assignments. Because my daughter doesn’t need much repetition, I leave those parts out. It all adds up to an individualized educational experience for each child.

Catherine is a homeschooling mom of a 13 year old daughter and a 10 year old son. Her children were homeschooled by their father while Catherine worked as a Family Physician until three years ago. Since that time, Catherine has been the homeschooling parent since she is no longer able to work due to illness while her husband is developing a business doing math tutoring. Her hobbies include blogging, reading, knitting, and trying to stay (somewhat) sane. Please visit her blog at Domestic Adventure.

Photo credit:  Heidi of Mt. Hope Chronicles