When it comes to learning, everyone has a different style.
Some children are visual learners — absorbing information best through diagrams and colorful presentations — while others may learn better through speaking and listening. It’s important to know what style of learner your child is, so you can ensure your lessons match up.
Approximately 65% of people have visual learning styles — so chances are, your child does too. In this guide, we’ll break down everything there is to know about visual learning, and how you can help the visual learner in your life.
What is the visual learning style?
Visual learners tend to understand and retain information much better when it’s presented in a visual way — e.g. laid out in a chart rather than explained verbally. They think primarily in pictures and are good at visualizing whole scenes in their mind. Most visual learners seem to notice everything around them and love color.
By contrast, the other main learning styles are:
- Auditory: children who learn best through speaking and reading aloud
- Kinesthetic: kids who are very tactile and learn through touch and experience
- Reading/writing: kids who learn by reading information and writing it down.
How to recognize visual learners
If your child is a doodler or you notice them taking a lot of notes, they’re probably a visual learner. They like seeing things laid out with clear directions, pictures, or diagrams. Visual learners respond well to color-coded systems, are usually creative, and have active imaginations. Often, visual learners tend to be tidy and organized in their learning habits.
If this sounds like your child, we’ve got some tips to make sure you’re tailoring their education to their learning style.
7 tools and activities for children with a visual learning style
A small whiteboard
Having a whiteboard, even just a handheld one, is a game-changer for visual learners. For each lesson, you can write out keywords and main ideas, or draw diagrams using different colors to illustrate your point.
Seeing things laid out neatly just works better for visual brains.
Encourage students to use the whiteboard as well, to draw charts or pictures throughout the lesson. The act of taking information and putting it into a visual medium can be a great comprehension tool for kids, as they’re learning to process information in their own way.
Engaging worksheets
Reciting information to a visual learner might not be enough for them — it’s important to demonstrate and illustrate what you’re saying, too. And worksheets are a great way to do this.
Quality worksheets present information in a way that’s interactive, helping your child work through a new concept to help cement it in their mind.
And worksheets don’t have to be boring. We’ve got a huge database of fun, full-color bundles that are well-suited to the visual learning style. For example, this American Revolution worksheet pack has a map, a visual timeline, and a cause and effect chart. This math worksheet bundle uses diagrams and drawing exercises to explain the concept of fractions.
Why not explore our whole library of worksheets? We’ve got you covered for hundreds of different topics.
Anchor charts
Anchor charts are a wonderful way to visually summarize a lesson. You can make one at the start of a new topic, to introduce key concepts and ideas. Or your child can make their own after finishing a lesson, to recap what they’ve learned.
The key is to make them as colorful and visually pleasing as possible. You can use them to decorate your classroom or compile them in a folder that students can refer back to. Here’s some more info on making effective anchor charts.
Lapbooks
Lapbooks are a great tool to get your students engaged by letting them take the reins. They’re essentially just mini-books, made by your kids, filled with essential information about a certain topic. You can then bundle all these mini-books into a file folder to keep them all in one place.
Let your child handle the research and planning for the book, as well as choosing how it’s laid out and formatted. Visual learners will really benefit from the creative process of putting together their lapbook.
It’ll also help you, as a parent and/or teacher, to see how their brain works when collecting and presenting information — you can borrow similar techniques for lessons in the future!
Highlighters and colored markers
Don’t underestimate the power of colored markers! Visual learners love color, and being able to highlight their readings or make a diagram with many different colors will help reinforce their learning. Having a color-coded system can do wonders for information recall. For example, in a history lesson, students can highlight passages using green for dates, blue for places, and yellow for names.
Doodling
Some kids (and adults!) have much better comprehension levels if they can doodle while learning. So long as they’re not focusing only on drawing, doodling can help visual brains process a lesson and let it come out in a way they can understand.
Leave blank space in the margins of their workbooks, or use a separate, unlined notebook where your students can let their thoughts flow out through drawing. Again, just like with lapbooks, you can look at their doodles for insights into how their brains work while learning.
Visual presentations
It’s all well and good to read a passage in a textbook, but visual learners will retain so much more when information is presented as more than just words.
You could make a quick and simple Powerpoint presentation to help introduce certain topics. Include explanatory text, sure — but back it up with pictures, diagrams, and visual formatting. Seeing it all laid out in an easily-digestible slide will greatly benefit visual learners.
See the difference!
If you’ve identified your child as a visual learner, experimenting with these tools and activities could considerably boost their learning.
Check out KidsKonnect for more worksheets and other helpful resources for all learning styles!
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Link will appear as 7 Teaching Tools and Activities for Children with a Visual Learning Style (including Worksheets, Lapbooks, and Anchor Charts): https://kidskonnect.com - KidsKonnect, July 10, 2020