About Learning Styles.

When all else fails, read the instructions! My mother's sarcasm.

Homeschooling is a state of constant flux. Either our children are changing, or we are. Sometimes everyone changes at once. Sometimes other things change. Sometimes the whole thing just makes me tired. No, this is not another rant about my beloved youngest child. My beloved youngest child is being very accommodating just now, even with her math. Nope, this is about learning styles ~ or rather a particular learning style.

God in his infinite wisdom made little people to do the *monkey see, monkey do* thing ~ which is why you see Clara~Jane stomping round in her mama's high heels with a gash of bright red lippy from ear to ear. Practise makes perfect. Or why little Freddy has his daddy's hammer hooked on the loops of his jeans. Most small people are hands on learners. Some stay that way their whole lives & thank God they do or we would have no plumbers, no electricians, no mechanics, no farmers.

As little people grow bigger many show tendencies to learn in other ways: visuals learn best by *seeing*, audios by hearing, Kinesthetics by using their body & the hands on by doing. Most people fall into one of these 4 main areas but there are other ways of looking at how people learn best & when combined with the four main learning styles allow homeschoolers to better tailor their homeschool program to a particular child's needs.

Now Liddy was a kinesthetic & a concrete sequential thinker. She used her body to learn. She used her senses to learn & she was a methodical, sequential learner. Apart from the jiggle like a hooked fish & move your books around the entire house she was pretty easy to teach. Actually she did a lot of it herself & fitted very nicely into the sequential orderly world of the modern classroom. She did well at home too. Ditz is not like that.

Ditz is a visual/spatial child: messy, random, illogical. Random is the key word. The Gregorc system uses 4 learning styles too ~ a combination of sequential, random, abstract & concrete. Ditz & I are both visual/spatial learners. We are both random learners. This means we share many learning similarities ~ which should make things easier, right? Wrong. Nope. It actually makes it infinitely harder because the common ground confuses the issue.

Let's look at it a little more closely. Ditz & I are both random learners. This means our minds order information in chunks. It can arrive any old which way. Our minds work like a jig~saw & slot the information into the appropriate space. We both dislike structure, don't follow directions or rules well, are not detail orientated & need a stimulus rich environment ~ & there the similarities end. Ditz is a concrete thinker. She is almost totally reliant on her senses to process information: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. All the tags for ADHD are there: the short attention span, the fidgets, the strong will, the need for a reason to do anything. You have no idea how this begins to clash with an abstract thinker who is not reliant on her senses to process information. I visualise, imagine, grasp hidden meanings & ideas or make quantum leaps of intuition.

It is no surprise to me to be told the art world is littered with concrete random learners ~ lots of rule~breakers, fashion nightmares, *free~thinkers*. What I what to know is: how does one teach them effectively?

Audio~visual aides ~ tick.
Choices ~ tick.
Short dynamic presentations ~ well yes, but she's in grade 10 & it's getting harder to stick with that.
Full control of their own projects ~ not on my nelly when it comes to school work because I am accountable to our umbrella & they are accountable to the government.

The problem is the rest of it; the scientific reports [which guaranteed Ditz will never ever of her own volition apply; why would she, her mother doesn't]; the abstract math, ditto; the writing for no discernible purpose than to demonstrate she can when she & I both know she can so why must she prove it? *sigh*

There is absolutely no good reason why children should learn most of what we ask them to learn once they have grasped the basics. And no, it's good discipline for the mind & the intellect is not a good reason, not when you are a concrete abstract. The question is: can I use it in everyday life for a purpose I want? Answer to almost all education then becomes, No. Scary? Yet from observation I would suggest these children are very good at *living life*. They have determination. They have grit. They think outside the box. They know how to enjoy what they are doing ~ & they know how to achieve their goals!

We know so much about the different ways our children learn now & the multiple sorts of intelligences they display isn't it about time our schools & our curriculum suppliers caught up with the research? As my mother so aptly put it, & looking at the number of children falling through the cracks in the system, isn't it about time somebody read the instructions?!