Learning Styles

Learning styles can play a huge role in homeschooling. A major focus of education should be teaching students how to learn, and this includes identifying their learning style and teaching them how to cater to it in their studies.

This article is a good overview of learning styles. Working with a student (or students) is an exercise is getting to know them and their learning style. By homeschooling, there is a greater ability to tune the curriculum to match so information is absorbed more easily. It can definitely mean the difference between a exciting successful learning experience and a bout of total frustration.

I tend to be a spatial thinker, so here are some personal tips I have learned over the years:

• Mind maps are awesome. They convert information and relationships into spatial information. FreeMind is a good piece of software for generating mind maps.
• Arranging typical flash cards into spatial patterns can help memorization. Think of the game memory.
• Maps, timelines, and other graphics can really help absorption of material.
• Sometimes the act of creating information (like drawing your own timeline) can really help a student remember.
  

For other types of thinkers, keep in mind that the actions during studying drastically impact learning. Reading a book to oneself versus reading a book aloud versus listening to a recording of a book versus watching a movie of a book are all drastically different cognitive processes. In some people, only 1 of these options will really allow them to remember the content.

Multi-Discipline Project for Spring

Spring is in the air and my daughter is ready to get outside. So yesterday I gave her a 50 foot tape measure, a large sheet of posterboard, and told her to make a scale drawing of our property. First she is starting with the hardscape (walls, sidewalks, driveway, deck, patio, property lines, fences).

I like this project a lot because it teaches a number of necessary skills:

• Organization -- She has to take a lot of measurements and keep track of them.
• Precision -- She needs to get every measurement correct or it will throw her whole project off.
• Planning -- Planning out what measurements to take and in what order is a good challenge.
• Neatness -- Small errors will propagate within the project if she isn't very neat with her lines.
• Spatial Cognition -- She is learning how to judge distances, proportions, and how things fit together.
• Drawing skills -- She'll need to work on drawing neat, precise lines, curves.

Eventually, she'll get to the softscape -- plants, trees, and flower beds, which will give her a basis for looking up some of the plants. This is a good exercise for science. She also will be calculating areas in the future (How many square feet of lawn do we have?)