Classical Education and Learning Styles

Some are claiming that learning styles are a myth.  I beg to differ.

God, in His infinite wisdom (or humor), graced us with 3 kids and 3 different learning styles.

PJ, The Auditory Learner:  While he’s a bright kid that doesn’t miss much, he prefers auditory input.  He’d rather listen to a book than read it and never misses a work.

Mia, The Visual Learner:  Mia doesn’t hear much.  Most goes in one ear and out the other.  On the plus side, she tunes Ty’s constant loudness out  more easily when trying to complete an assignment.  She gets it from me.  I tried for a year to get her to memorize my cell phone by telling it to her over and over and over and over and over (well you get the point) again.  I don’t know why it never occurred to me to write it down for her.  After she memorized our home phone and both of our cells that I had written on our white board in under 5 minutes, I realized she must be our visual learner.  Since she’s only an emerging reader, this makes her a bit of a challenge to teach.

Ty, The Kinesthetic Learner: Shocker, right?  Not only does Ty need to be in constant motion but he only learns from doing.  No amount of “Don’t touch/eat that it’s hot/spicy” works.  He just has to experience.  We really can all benefit from kinesthetic learning but kinesthetic learners tend to only learn this way.

So how does this play out in Classical Education?  We are teaching all of our kids as if they are currently still in the Grammar Stage (although PJ’s really an early emerger to the Logic Stage).  That means we are inputing in as much information on as many things as possible.  We do this through a lot of memorization and reading.  We memorize through:

Song: Luckily even visual and kinesthetic learners can get songs stuck in their heads.  It may just take a couple more repetitions than the auditory who only has to hear it once.

Flashcards and visuals: Picture cues are a huge help to Mia since she tends to visualize it when she’s trying to remember it.  My new favorite site is Quizlet which lets you create or use custom flashcards and play a variety of games with them.

Body motions:  We often go through our memory work with body motions and hand signs.  While it’s great for any body to be up and get the blood flowing, these are things that particularly keep kinesthetic learners engaged.

Since Mia isn’t reading independently, I read a lot of picture books that pertain to the subject matter at hand.  Sometimes we stop and act out certain parts.

As I said before, anyone can benefit from kinesthetic (sometimes called hands-on) learning so we do a lot of experiments, crafts, builds, and field trips.  For example, we experimented on chicken bones while studying the skeleton and visited a couple colonial sites and Williamsburg to reinforce the Revolutionary time period in history.