How Understanding About Learning Styles Can Help Your Children

Most people have heard of learning styles. It has been around for quite a while now. It is about the mode that people learn in. There are three learning styles: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Everyone has all three styles but there is one style that is preferred over the others.

Visual is where people learn through seeing, auditory is where people learn through hearing and kinesthetic is where people learn through movement and touch. To understand more about this, visit  here and while you're there you might like to take a quick test to find out what your style is.

The point to this is that if you know what your child's learning style is, you can help him/her to learn better. For example, I was trying to help my son learn a surah from the Qur'an and I was teaching him in the style that I preferred - the visual. For memorising the Qur'an to be effective for me I need to visualise the words of the Qur'an, its position in the sentence and its position in the surah. So I learn it in chunks or phrases and visualise those chunks. I have never been able to memorise through just listening to the Qur'an. And so I thought my method was a great method because it worked for me. But when I taught my son this way, he couldn't do it properly. He kept forgetting and getting lost. So I just gave him the mp3 and told him to go and learn it by himself. And do you know what? He learnt it in a flash, masha Allah. I realised then that he was an auditory learner. Now every time that he has any type of test, I would tell him to say it out loud and to repeat what he's learning out loud.

Another example is in my prekindergarten class. I had a boy who could not sit still so I thought maybe he's kinesthetic. But I began to notice that every time we sang a nasheed or a learning song such as phonics and number songs and fingerplays, he would pick it up after hearing it once while the other kids were still memorising the words. I told his mother this and it made her understand how he learns and how she could help him.

Do you know what your learning style is or that of your children or students? If you don't then it may help to read about it and identify it for your children. It may improve their learning (and yours).