What is Your Toddler's Learning Style – Part 2

I’ve been pondering a lot more about Gavin’s learning style and trying to find some sort of quiz I can do to help me figure it out.  So far, I’ve come across two – one by Scholastic, which seems more appropriate for older children, and Kaboose.

I tried out Kaboose and got the following results, which I can’t help but feel doubtful about:

Kinesthetic

You’ve got a kinesthetic learner! Kinesthetic learners tend to learn best through doing. Words or pictures don’t mean much to your child – until he can actually start touching or playing with things, he won’t feel like he completely understands them.

Now that you know your child’s learning style, you can use it to help him maximize his learning abilities. For instance, when your child is learning about shapes and angles, have him actually create those shapes and angles with blocks. As part of a history lesson, have him recreate whatever event in history he’s studying. If you want to teach your child about the dangers of crossing the street, actually reenact a street crossing with a toy truck and plastic doll. It’s through actively engaging in an activity that your child will best absorb information.

Because of this need for activity and exploration, kinesthetic learners tend to have trouble staying still for extended periods of time. But rest assured … your active, engaged child is probably very good at sports, physical comedy, or mimicking others. With these special skills, he’s well on his way to being a famous celebrity someday!

Auditory – 30%

Visual – 20%

Kinesthetic – 50%

Personally, if there were ever a question about what Gavin’s learning style was, I thought it might either have been auditory or visual.  Kinesthetic was definitely last on my list.  Why?  Because he was always very cautious at the playground and is hardly what I would have considered “adventurous”.  Only recently has he started to come out of his shell.

I found another article on BellaOnline which was actually for children with learning disabilities, but I thought the information was still pretty relevant regardless of whether you child is excelling at learning or having trouble.  What I liked most about that article is that they have lots of links to articles on how to teach Kinesthetic learners.  If the results from the quiz above are correct, then this is surely a site I’ll need to bookmark.

I digress, in the article from BellaOnline, the author Kramer summarises the different learning styles as follows:

Auditory: mainly learns through listening to directions, takes notes from speeches, likes talking on the phone, sounds out words phonetically, remembers verbal directions.

Visual: learns through looking at charts, pictures, diagrams, movies, illustrated procedures, remembers from seeing rather than listening.

Kinesthetic: learns by doing and moving, does an experiment by touching and feeling the materials, learns language by getting together for a conversation with a partner, gestures while speaking, uses expressive language.

I still see Gavin doing all of these things fairly equally without any particular behaviour jumping out at me.  He loves “talking” on the phone to Daddy, Ah Kong or Ah Mah (even if it’s pretend).  Sometimes he pretends he’s the Fat Controller ordering his engines to do various tasks.

He studies things he watches on TV and charts I have created for him with equal intensity and seems to really enjoy them.

He also does the gesturing part and is quite expressive with his language for a two and half year old.

Yesterday, while I was chatting with my SIL2, she thought Gavin was more of an auditory learning based on the fact that he comes home from school with new songs he’s learned.

Perhaps it is a little too early to decide what type of learning style he is.  What do you think?  Have you got a toddler who clearly fits into one of the learning styles already?  Or do you find it difficult to tell at this stage?