Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

God made each person unique, and that uniqueness includes the ways we learn. Today on Home School Heartbeat, Michael Farris, Chairman and General Counsel of Home School Legal Defense Association, speaks about how parents can discover the best way to teach each individual child.

Michael Farris:

Have you noticed that one of your children learns best by hands-on experiments, while another likes to hear you explain the lesson and another wants to see a picture? This phenomenon isn't your imagination. Educational experts tell us that each person has their own learning style.

The educational community would call your child a visual, auditory, or tactile learner. Simply put, he's either a watcher, listener, or doer.

You can tell your child is a visual learner if he does best when he sees what you expect of him. He pays a lot of attention to pictures and graphs, and picks up concepts best when you use flashcards, puzzles, matching games, computer games, and the like.

If your child is an auditory learner, he's probably very verbal-talking, singing, or just making noise. He learns best when you read to him, explain concepts verbally, or use songs and rhymes to help him memorize.

And what about your child who wants to touch everything, build models, and does well when you let him handle real objects? He's a kinesthetic learner, and will do best when you give him lots of hands-on activities and experiments.

When it comes to education, the more individualized you can be, the better. I'm Michael Farris.