Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic – The Learning Style That Beats Chanting Every Time
Even parents who think they are usually far more open, laid back and understanding of their own children than their parents might have been of them tend to become a little unhinged around their kids’ exam times. Eager to ensure that their child does as well as possible – which is of course important indeed – many tend to start to turn into drill sergeants, marshaling their children to study, study, study to make sure that they have all the information they need tucked away inside their heads.
There’s nothing wrong with encouraging good study habits but they have to be just that; good study habits that are also effective. And the sad truth is that as parents of kids today the methods our parents and teachers brought us up with are often nowhere near as effective as they thought.
Most popular of all, you might remember, was the ‘chanting’ method. Mum or Dad – or maybe even both – stood over you while you repeated the same pieces of information over and over again, basically in an attempt to make them ‘stick’ in your head for easy retrieval at exam time. And because it’s how we studied as children, and did OK in school, we just assume it’s a good method to pass on to our own kids.
Stop for a second and think back though. Remember how your eyes used to glaze over the tenth time you had to repeat a maths formula? And maybe even the fact that all of the chanting meant that eventually the formula itself did stick in your head but because you never really understood how to use it anyway it was still pretty useless to you at exam time?
There is no doubt that if a child can memorize words, phrases and even maths formulas they will likely have an advantage in the exam room. But for most kids the ‘chanting’ method is just not the right way to go about achieving this. It’s boring, doesn’t really address the subject matter properly and for some kids at least, next to useless. There is another way though, one that’s growing in popularity and for very good reason; because it does work.
The Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic (VAK) learning style takes a different approach. For years now researchers have been telling us about the three types of learning we are all capable of – Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic – and that some of us are better suited to one style over another, and when those styles are utilized whatever we are trying to learn and memorize all becomes much clearer and much easier to remember.
VAK learning encompasses all three styles so that everyone’s strengths are catered to. Visual learners tend to think in pictures and need to create vivid mental images to retain information while auditory learners respond best to verbal lectures, discussions, talking things through and listening to what others have to say. And the kinesthetics? They need to do it, act it out, make it ‘real’ in order to learn properly. And if you can combine the three concepts as VAK does then everyone has a better chance at actually retaining what they’ve learned.
Not sure how this all works, or even if it really does? Well then, let us show you. Attend our introductory workshop and we’ll show you how, using our proven Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic learning techniques it’s quite possible to memorize up to 450 words in 60 minutes. After that you’ll never tell your kid it’s time to start chanting for an hour again, and trust us, they will thank you for that!
