When I first heard about homeschool learning styles was when my first child was 5 years old. I wanted all the homeschool learning styles tips I could get.
And 20+ years later there is still mixed science about how much difference learning styles really makes.
Today, I’m sharing how understanding homeschool learning styles of not only my children, but myself was a positive experience.
Besides, the brain is such a fascinating machine and there is much to know about we learn.
Nobody can really be labeled with one hundred percent accuracy. We’re always learning and changing.
So, I will share how learning styles helped me to accept differences in my children.
And now that my children are young adults, I’m glad I trusted what I know about my children and educated myself about learning styles.
Further, I will help you to sort out terms because it’s not necessary to speak educationalese to have a starting place.
Homeschool Style
First, this is the biggest point that helped me to understand learning styles.
And that is to move away from what a lot of educational institutions as well as universities identify as learning styles.
Without making this overly technical, a lot of professionals will write and speak about modalities.
It simply means how children or adults prefer to take in information.
Then, scientist and researchers have classified learners into kinesthetic (hands-on learner), auditory or visual.
Also, some of that long standing research has changed to include one more group which is reading/writing. It is called the VARK model.
It stands for Visual, Auditory, Reading/ Writing, and Kinesthetic modalities for learning by (Fleming and Mills, 1992).
However, the three major ones focused on for years are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. As you can see right away this may or may not be helpful.
Because I was not a public-school educator prior to homeschooling, it was not helpful.
Beginning Point for Types of Homeschool Styles
Hence expanding on how these learning modalities help us teach at home is more important than understanding all the scientific in/outs.
So, instead of focusing on just the components of modalities, focus on your child’s learning personality. What is his learning personality?
This expanded view opened a whole another view of how to teach.
Switch from just learning style to learning personality. Again, this encompasses all the things that make your child unique.
In other words, look below on how I expanded the profile of each of my children to go beyond modality.
- What is his interest?
- Is he an introvert or extrovert?
- Does he naturally flock toward others or prefer long periods alone?
- Are interests nature based (not because you expose them to him), technologically oriented, or just prefers to read a book about all of it?
- Does he prefer to just build instead of talk about it?
- Is he competitive almost defiant?
- How about inventing? Is that all that matters? His inventions?
These are a few of the questions I started asking myself about each of my children. I added these to their preferred way of taking in information or learning style.
In addition, I examined how I learned and taught my children. With my first child, I had no problem teaching him.
However, my second son came along and all that changed.
I wasn’t sure I was cut out to teach him because none of my tips with my first child seemed to work with him.
Then started my research to learn how to expand learning styles to learning personalities.
One of the best books to this day although it’s older is Discover Your Child’s Learning Style: Children Learn in Unique Ways – Here’s the Key to Every Child’s Learning Success.
And here is their free pdf for an assessment.
Identifying Your Homeschooled Child’s Learning Personality
Finally, after years of putting the pieces together, I have created an online self-paced course on how to identify your homeschool child’s learning personality.
This course will give you solid beginning points and look what you will learn.
YOU WILL LEARN:
- How to understand the way your child prefers to learn so that you can teach him in a way that he enjoys learning;
- How to pinpoint your child’s learning personality;
- A starting point in understanding (barring any special learning challenges or disabilities) and accepting your child’s preferred way of taking in information;
- Understanding when the learning personality emerges; and
- Teaching tips for each learning personality to stop the head-butting.
I have my course on my sister site How to Homeschool EZ by Tina Robertson.
And look at these other resources about learning styles
