As you may know, I am teaching an online class on Sept. 18 for ADD Classes. It’s called “ADD Teens: Making the Grade in School”. Here’s a little sneak preview of one of the things I’m going to talk about. Don’t forget to check out the corresponding link in the box to the right.

It’s important for you as a parent to be aware of how your child learns. One of the easiest ways to do this is to find out their learning style. Learning styles can be categorized in a number of ways, but one of the simplest is to identify learners as either auditory, visual, or kinesthetic learners:

• Auditory learners learn best by listening. They are usually successful in school because most teachers still use lectures as their primary teaching method.
• Visual learners learn best when pictures, charts, graphs, and other visual presentation methods are used to present or enhance the information being taught.
• Kinesthetic learners are hands on learners. They do best in classes that let them get involved in the process, such as science labs or art or music classes. Incorporating movement into the learning process can also help.

How does this help you as a parent? Here’s an example: your child needs to read Pride and Prejudice for their Language Arts class. Knowing that their reading skills are not strong, especially when it comes to long books, you look for ways to reinforce what they are reading.

• An auditory learner might benefit from a tape of someone reading the book aloud.
• A visual learner would benefit more from watching the movie as well as reading the book.
• A kinesthetic learner would benefit from the movie as well, since it incorporates movement. They would also benefit from the audio tape, if they listened to it, for instance, as they took a walk or ran on the treadmill.

Sometimes you have to get creative with this process, but with a little out of the box thinking, you can come up with some great ideas.