What Teaching Method Should You Use?
By Sun Kyu Bae |
Published April 10, 2009 |
Articles |
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Gain some valuable insights into how to homeschool your student for maximum fulfillment and minimum stress!
If you’re already this far along, congratulations!
Now that you’ve been versed on various aspects of homeschool, the next thing you need to define is the best teaching method for your student.
And really, when you are asking about the best teaching method to fit your child, you’re really asking yourself what learning style your child favors the most. When you know and understand your child’s learning style, then it will be much easier to determine the best teaching method for her.
Learning Styles
Before we start, you may have noticed there are numerous psychologists with important looking papers who have identified the various learning styles of children in their own insightful sounding way – LSI, ELT, learning models with multiple levels characterized by dynamic hierarchies and cycles (whatever that means) – it’s enough to throw your hands up in the air and forget about the whole thing, or leave you wondering whether you should earn a psychology major before even thinking about doing anything with your child.
Not to worry, because you can actually determine the learning style of your child by yourself without (gasp!) any assistance from psychologists. So, let’s put the academic research papers down and approach this from the parent’s viewpoint (a parent assessing her child’s behavior instead of a licensed professional?! What a fantastic concept!).
The true “secret” behind determining your child’s learning style really comes down to nothing more than what you think, based on years of interacting with your child – I’ve listed these below:
Visual – Best understands new concepts and instructions by “seeing” what is being taught. Reinforcement of new concepts is learned best by drawing on paper to illustrate the new concept and using visual aids to respond to the child’s follow-up questions.
Auditory – Best understands new concepts and instructions by hearing about the concept. Reinforcement of new concepts is learned best by your child asking you to repeat the concept and by asking follow-up questions (and follow-up questions to her follow-up questions).
Tactile – Best understands new concepts and instructions by using props. Reinforcement of new concepts is learned best by your child using those same props to illustrate her follow-up questions.
Based on the explanations above, don’t think you have an odd kid if your child demonstrates more than 1 or even all 3 of the styles above, children usually do. However, (and here’s the rub) your mission is to find out if there are any “regions of dominance” of learning styles when your child is learning a given subject. For example, which style prevails when learning to read or do math? How about history or science? And this is exactly where your ability as a parent can outrank any hoity poity research. Because what you are doing is identifying by subject which learning style prevails for your child.
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