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Why VAK Cognitive Style is Important
While we don't believe that kids CAN only learn in certain ways, we believe that kids PREFER to learn certain ways and that the more we're able as parents and educators to key into these learning preferences, the more exciting, engaging and intrinsically motivating learning can be for our kids.
"Educators' attraction to the idea of learning styles partly reflects their (correctly) noticing how often one student may achieve enlightenment from an approach that seems useless for another student." (p116, Learning Styles, Concepts & Evidence)
What VAK cognitive style modalities do your students enjoy using? Find out now.
Optimizing Lessons for Visual Learners
Observation is key to study success for visual learners. The following are a few techniques that can help visual students learn how to learn better:
Encourage visual students to keep a daily to-do list, then cross off each item as it's completed
Find youtube videos of the concepts you are teaching in class and send the links to visual students's parents so that they can “see” the lesson again
Teach visual students to Mind Map, Venn Diagram or timeline concepts
Encourage visual students to illustrate concepts you are teaching or problems they need to solve (e.g. if a word problem is “Mary has 3 apples and Suzy takes 2 of them. How many apples does Mary have left?”, then have visual students draw two stick figures and three apples under one stick figure, then circle two of the apples and draw an arrow to Suzy.)
Give visual students scratch paper during quizzes and tests so that they can diagram or illustrate test questions as necessary