Do You Know Your Middle Schooler's Learning Style?
By Ann Matturro Gault

The Auditory Learner

Listening is the key to learning for your child – she needs to read aloud and recite information in order to comprehend it. 

How to Help
If she is studying for a test, encourage her to read or recite salient information aloud to you or a friend. Since note-taking is difficult for auditory learners (they need to stay focused on listening to the words), have her tape-record her teachers’ lectures, then help her make or record notes from the lecture at home. Another strategy is to create study cards, then repeat the information from the card into a tape recorder. Play the tape back several times — repetition is essential.

Bret Benson makes history more interesting for his daughter Hannah by telling her related stories. “I was a history major in college and I remember odds bits of information that is sometimes relevant,” Benson says. “When Hannah was learning about the Civil War, for example, I explained how the use of rifles and muskets impacted the outcome.
Hearing my stories triggers something that helps her remember facts and details.”

The Kinesthetic Learner
Your child is a hands-on learner. He is feeling- and touch-oriented. Doing projects and experiments and writing down information that can be applied to real-life situations helps him learn. He may have trouble sitting still for long periods of time.

How to help
Have your child take small, frequent breaks when studying. Help him learn to set goals for himself — studying five pages of text at a time, for example — and work up to longer periods if possible. Or, set a timer; when it sounds, have your child take a break and do something physical. Try writing information on study cards and laying them out on the floor in various locations. Have him practice reciting them as he moves around the room. Some kinesthetic learners say chewing gum or playing with toy putty helps them stay focused while doing homework.

Al Summers, director of professional development for the National Middle School Association, was a teacher for 27 years. He liked using manipulatives to make his lessons more tactile. When learning about the seasons, Summers’s science students couldn’t grasp why the Earth wasn’t closest to the sun during summer. “Logic says the opposite is true. Hot days should mean proximity to the hot sun, right? Wrong. But until I broke out the models and allowed each group to demonstrate the tilt and rotation of the Earth, they didn’t get it.”