Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Learning styles and structure

Okay, here's the question of the day: How do you structure your "school time" and what is your child's learning style? If you don't have a child, then what is YOUR learning style and structure? I know not all of us homeschool, but all of us DO indeed teach our children, so the question still applies.

For our family, I prefer working on a schedule. That's not to say that I'm usually successful at it, though. I just find that we get more done when we have a general time frame to work by. The kids know what to expect and I don't worry all day about when I'm going to get other necessary things done. Our plan went much better before #4 was born. :-) That's okay... he's certainly worth every interruption!!

As far as learning styles, Isabelle is like me. She could read books and do worksheets all day. We are seat-learners, I guess you could say. Ethan, on the other hand, prefers to work with his hands. He needs visual aids, too. The more reinforcement the better, and learning better be fun or he's not going to pay much attention. He's getting better at doing some of the necessary writing, but it's not his favorite by any means. At first I struggled with not having as many papers in hand for him at the end of the day. Silly, I know. We do a lot of science, history, etc orally and use our maps, and so forth. I'm all for handwriting practice, but I'm learning that I don't need a paper for everything he does!

Trevor wants to be loved on all the time. He wants to be in my lap, or touching my hair, or crawling over my back. If he's physically on us, then he's paying attention. At first I thought this drive to be near us must stem from him needed more one-on-one time. Maybe that is the case at times, but it seems like his attention hole is a bottomless pit. It's a black hole. He just wants us ALL the time. If I bend over to get something, you can be sure there is a monkey ready to latch on my back! Sometimes that drives me a little nuts.

I could go on and on about what we do with our day, who likes which subject best, and how we do our experiments... but I will save that for another survey!
Signing off!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

oh, i want to tell you all about it. unfortunately, my attached monkey is hugging my neck, sleeping soundly right now. and the tooth fairy is expected shortly, so i need to run. but i'll be back to this one!

Brandi said...

So far we are trying to figure this out..Kass learns from everything we do she a sponge a hard one to figure out and my Jaeger Bear who is very active the only thing I am sure of is that he will be different from Kassidy..

Anonymous said...

Ethan just needs more motivation.