The Visual Learning Style

This post will look at how to teach children that have visual learning as part of their personal learning repertoire.  Visual learning is one of what is considered "the big three" of learning styles, which are visual, auditory, and kinetic.  This post will deal specifically with visual learning.

The Individual Learning Repertoire
All people combine different learning styles to make up their own unique learning repertoire.  Sometimes people even have opposite learning styles for different activities.  No one person relies solely on one learning style, and no one person combines all learning styles.  For example, my learning style repertoire includes visual and auditory learning depending on the activity.  When dealing with reading material, I have a visual learning style.  I remember nearly everything I see.  However, with music I combine visual and auditory learning.  Sometimes I rely solely on what I see in the music and other times I will rely on what my ear tells me.  Most people like me combine many different learning styles depending on the nature of the activity to be done.

How the Teacher's Learning Style Plays into the Equation
The learning style a person initially uses for an activity can also be biased by the teaching style of the teacher.  For example, my mother taught me to cook using a hands-on method.  However, as I came into my own as an adult, I switched to a more dominant learning style for me.  Hands-on learning falls very low in my learning repertoire.  I became 1000% better at cooking when I switched to a more dominant learning style for myself.  I can follow a recipe much better than my mother can.  She has hands-on learning as one of her dominant learning styles.  Because she was my teacher, I initially had to learn using hands-on.  This phenomenon explains why a child can struggle horribly under one teacher only to have the same material all at once blossom the next year.  It has everything to do with the teaching style of the teacher meshed with the learning style of the student.

What Constitutes the Visual Learning Style?
How can you tell if you or a child you serve has a visual learning style?  A person with a visual learning style usually retains more than 50% of what they see.  When they look at material, they are drawn to the pictures and can remember details from the pictures.  Many very dominant visual learners have photographic memories.  Do you rely more on what you see than what you hear?  Then chances are that you have visual learning in your repertoire.

We live in a very visually oriented society.  We are bombarded with visual images constantly.  However, that does not mean that everyone in our society has a visual learning style.  Some people simply do not retain what they see.  They may see visual images constantly, but when asked later to recall what they see, they cannot do it.  These people do not have visual learning as part of their repertoire.

The Individual Variations
As I said earlier, I have visual learning in my own personal repertoire as do all three of my biological children.  Therefore, when I homeschooled, I filled my walls with all kinds of charts, pictures, graphs, timelines, etc. because I knew my children would benefit from these visuals.  However, the degree to which each of my children benefitted from these visuals varied.  My oldest is not as strong a visual learner as my other two.  She benefitted from the visuals but also had to have other types of learning thrown in for various subjects, and it varied from subject to subject.  With math, she had to have more hands-on than the other two as well as science, but she remembers what she reads.  The charts and pictures that contained words were easier for her to retain than a simple picture.  Each person will process information in their own unique way.  It is our job as a teacher to find that way and utilize it.

Over the years I have had the majority of my children in my preschool have visual learning fairly high in their repertoire.  Therefore, I have visuals in my childcare everywhere.  However, I now have one child that is not a visual learner at all.  He is an auditory learner, and he pays no attention to all the pictures, charts, graphs, etc.  He also has attention issues.  Visuals tend to overstimulate him and cause him to shut down and drift.  I have to keep his visual stimulus very simple and make sure I use plenty of verbal explanation as I walk him through activities.  He remembers what he hears in such detail, it is astonishing.  I call him my walking encyclopedia.  However, sometimes he does not retain what he hears either.  With him, it very much depends on what gets his attention, which can be random unless it deals with animals.  He always pays attention when the discussion turns to animals.  His unique repertoire will fall into other categories we will discuss in future posts.

In Conclusion
To sum up, visual learners need lots of material before their eyes.  They benefit from visually stimulating textbooks and usually learn well with computer graphics.  In a preschool setting, they will be the children to notice all the labels we are encouraged to put all over everything.  They will be the ones to notice when you change decorations or visuals on the walls in two seconds flat.  These children need a good variety of picture books to peruse.  You must never underestimate what these children can learn from a picture.  They will also benefit greatly from exposure to art both realistic and abstract.  However, each child will latch onto different forms of visual stimuli.  Take note of what gets their interest.  More than likely, this will give you clues as to the unique mix of that child's learning repertoire.

I hope you have enjoyed this post.  Goodbye and God bless!! Check out Natalie's children's books at:  https://www.amazon.com/author/nataliewade7457