Not all of us get the most out of learning through seated focus and concentration! Here is what some of our team of tutors might do...
It’s challenging for many adults to revisit the learning process because by the time we’ve been working our jobs for more than a while, we may feel we’ve learned all we need to. Our daily work duties become second nature to us. Not only do we learn new information less frequently, as adults we are able to moderate our behaviour while we learn. This means that whether we are visual learners, aural learners or kinaesthetic learners, we don’t need these specifics to be catered to quite so directly.
When we’re young – school age – we’re learning all the time. Furthermore, by the time we have finished learning one thing, we go straight on to another new thing! It’s quite the onslaught for little minds, but this is when our brains are most absorbent. However, children do not all have the behaviour moderation skills that adults have. Sitting still and learning quietly is simply not how all kids do it and if you are a kinaesthetic learner, there can be nothing quite so agonising as being told to sit down and listen quietly.
Kinaesthetic learners need to move as they learn. But it can often seem like a hard task to keep someone moving when they’re learning fine motor skills (like handwriting) or maths. But there are solutions! Taggart Tutors encounters innumerable instances of young students who struggle to learn because the classroom environment doesn’t cater to their kinaesthetic needs. So here are three things we might do with kids who need to wriggle and worm to be their scholastic best.
Shaving Cream!
No, trimming your child’s beard (if they have one) is not going to help them learn. This is merely a fun way to practice letters and numbers. Now, you may need to remind your kids that they can’t eat it, but spreading shaving cream on a baking tray and writing letters and numbers with fingertips is an excellent way to enlarge the writing process, making it more physical and fun!
Treasure Hunts!
If you’re trying to learn letter and number recognition with your kids, treasure hunts are golden. Write large alphabet tiles and hide them around the house. Then show your child an example of the letter they need to find and send them looking! Once they’ve found a/the letter, we can sing its name out loud and repeat it over and over on the journey back to home base. If you’ve got ‘a home base alphabet’ up on the wall, it’s also a good idea to get your young learner to trace the letter on the wall with their finger. The hunting journey keeps kids active in their bodies as well as nice and loud, with a big celebratory finish at the end when the whole alphabet has been found. An alternative could include finding items around the house that start with a certain letter. That way, your treasures are already hidden!
Glass Windows!
Fun Fact: whiteboard markers come straight off glass doors and windows. This activity combines all the joy of drawing on the walls in bright colours with the benefits of learning handwriting, writing stories, labelling diagrams and more. For older kids who are learning parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives), this activity means that you can colour code words and draw visual representations of spelling words.
