"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." ~Albert Einstein

Hello. I hope you all had a great week and have been busy researching homeschooling and filling up that homeschool binder you started. This is a perfect time to be thinking and planning for homeschooling—you’ll be all ready by September. This week I want to talk about another important element to consider when homeschooling—or when learning at all, for that matter.

People learn in different ways. This has come to light in the last few years, and explains some of the failures in the public school system. It also explains why sometimes homeschooling works for kids who didn’t seem to be learning in the normal school setting. Some children are "visual" learners—they learn by watching demonstrations and seeing things happen. Others are " auditory" meaning that they learn best by being read to or hearing something. The third class of learners are called "kinesthetic" which means that they learn by doing things—hands on learning. You can see how, in a typical classroom setting, a child’s style of learning would help or hinder—depending on how the teacher was teaching—their learning. And this is another area where homeschooling can shine and be of great benefit to some children.

Once you figure out how your child learns best, you can build your curriculum and your learning style around it. A visual child is likely to become bored during long periods of having to listen to the teacher. And perhaps they will be easily distracted by something moving around. For this kind of child you’ll want to have lots of things that they can look at when they are schooling.

The auditory child may want to read out loud while he is learning to read, may repeat his ABC’s as he is learning to write them, or may really connect to music. This child might do well with you reading out loud to him, or asking him questions about a topic, and letting him answer them out loud, rather than having to write the answers down.

The kinesthetic child loves to touch things—pick them up—and learns by actually handling projects being worked on. If you watch a kinesthetic child, of which I have several, you will see them carefully look the item over—turn it over in their hand and run a finger along every edge. This child can remember how he nailed the boards together, but does not remember hearing someone tell him how to do it. These are the kids who do well with models and kits—or Legos.

In our early years of homeschooling, my two older children would build with their Lego sets from sunup to sundown for weeks at a time. We are still very much a Lego household. I think that when the day comes that I have no need to purchase more Legos, I will know that my children are truly growing up. The applied Tech teacher at the resource center tells me that my kids have amazing motor skills and the ability to follow directions, and he attributes it to the Lego play. Very often I talk to homeschooling parents who dismiss such activities as "playing" and I am quick to point out that yes, it is. That is what a child is supposed to do—play, up until the age of 8 or 9. All sorts of important skills are developed during this playtime that will serve them the rest of their lives.

There is a checklist called the "Barbe Modality Checklist" that you can use to figure out your child’s learning style. You can find it at: http://www.mxctc.commnet.edu/clc/survey.htm. There are different tests for different age groups, but this is a good one to start with and I recommend that you look the checklist over and try to get an idea of how best to arrange learning activities for your homeschooler.

If you are interested in doing a more in-depth analysis of your child’s learning style, a good book to read is "In their Own Way," by Thomas Armstrong, available at Amazon.com.

Mr. Armstrong states that there are seven kinds of intelligence, and that we all have some of each, in varying proportions. He lists these seven kinds of intelligence as:

Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Spatial, Musical, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Interpersonal, and Intrapersonal. I won’t go into the descriptions of each kind of intelligence according to Mr.Thomas, but his ideas do ring true after my years of homeschooling.

There is also quite a bit of evidence to suggest that different people learn better at different times of the day. The "circadian rhythms" govern our bodily functions, as well as our behavior. There is evidence to suggest that in general, before noon is the best time to schedule mental activities, and afternoon is best for activities that require physical movement. This study suggests that if you are using computers in your learning, as my family is, it would be best to schedule subjects such as programming and Webpage development in the early hours of the day. As computers are becoming more important in our daily lives, and are becoming a PART of our daily lives, this might be an important consideration.

And lastly, I’d like to remind you once again not to worry yourself into inaction about what method to start homeschooling with. The important thing is to start. You can always change things at any time. The most important thing that I have learned about homeschooling over the years is that it evolves as the needs of the children--and the family—change. When we first started homeschooling, it was mainly playing with Lego’s, watching PBS programs, and reading out loud. Now it is mainly on the computer, though we still do a lot of crafts and watch PBS programs. And we attend classes at a resource center, something that I would not have considered doing when we first started out, but which became necessary and right for my kids.

So there is a lot to think about this week. Especially if you have more than one child you are going to homeschool. Each child might need to be taught in a different way. Rather than appearing to be overwhelming to you, this should reinforce your decision to homeschool. The public school classroom cannot and will not address individual learning styles of children. They are required to attempt to teach the "average" child, whoever that may be. In doing so, the children both above this mid-line, and below, get overlooked. Or worse yet, put in some kind of special training and given a label—which often follows them for the rest of their life.
 

Resources:

Barbe Modality Checklist http://www.mxctc.commnet.edu/clc/survey.htm.

Questions? Something you would like to see?