Waco Moms and Contributor, Katelyn Kasper provide a curated guide and tips for Homeschool Learning and Teaching Styles. Katelyn in a Homeschool Graduate and mom who teachers her own children at home. Katelyn has used her expertise to create a guide go-to to assist current and potential homeschoolers.
One of the Best Things About Homeschooling: Several Ways to Learn and Teach
If you’re coming out of a traditional school setting, then this is something crucial to understand. Your homeschool doesn’t have to look like a traditional school in your living room. Children learn in different ways. People can teach in different ways. Understanding how your child learns and the teaching method that works best for your family is what will direct your homeschool path with curriculum and overall experience.
Learning Styles
Let’s talk about the traditional three learning styles, though there are several schools of thought that argue there are more methods. These three are a great starting point.
Visual
These students learn best through what they see. This can be images, graphs, notes, etc. They write things down to remember information and prefer watching something instead of just listening to it. Look at your child to see if they seem to learn more from a book or something visual than from what they heard. Visual learners tend to do well with more traditional methods of learning, especially reading.
Auditory
These students learn best by what they hear or talking through things. They like discussions, podcasts/lectures and reading aloud. Look at your child to see if they remember things set to music, what they heard (even commercials), and if they seem to be more verbal in general. Audio learners tend to do well having their lessons taught out loud and talking through the concepts.
Kinesthetic
These students retain information when they are physically involved, such as hands-on activities and experiments. They need to be able to move and prefer a more practical approach over sitting in a classroom. This is more difficult to teach because these students struggle to sit for long periods of time (traditional school settings are not fun). They may be athletically gifted or love to tear apart things to see how they work. Hands-on experiments are a wonderful way to help these students learn. Young children may fall into this category until they learn how to calmly sit still. Try removing their chair so they can stand on the ground or a balance board while completing their work.
Teaching Styles
Traditional
This style is most similar to a public-school setting. You’ll have a desk or normal seating area, focus on workbooks, have weekly schedules for your school days, teach in a way that aligns with the local school, embrace traditional tests to track progress, enjoy teacher planners and lesson plans.
Pros: Easy way to start to get your feet wet, great for visual learners, built-in structure, lots of curriculum options
Cons: Can get discouraged with comparisons, burnout, frustration trying to separate “school” from “home”, high expectations
Classical
This style uses a three-part process, Trivium (“three roads”), to train minds based on their developmental life stage. The first foundational category, Grammar, teaches concrete facts through memorization and repetition as a foundation of learning to elementary grades. The second part, called logic, teaches analytical thinking so students ask “why” to create a depth of understanding on the logic and method behind what they are learning. The last category, rhetoric, teaches how to apply what students have learned to create and describe original thoughts.
Pros: high academic standards, strong critical thinking, strong writing and listening skills
Cons: Can feel daunting and rote, intense workload, lots of memorization
Charlotte Mason
This style uses the concept of educating the whole child (atmosphere, discipline, life). A learning atmosphere includes you modeling how to learn and creating a learning environment, making the process of learning fun and celebrated. Disciplined learning includes good habits, repetition, students working hard to do their best. This style often uses the phrase “living books”, which are stories written by experts on a subject to bring the topic to life. “Life learning” focuses on intentional learning and experiences over mindless worksheets.
Pros: Create deep thinking, not many expensive materials, feels less structured than traditional schooling, embraces nature as schooling
Cons: Can be time intense for parents, many need older books, feels less structured than traditional schooling
Unit Study
This style uses a common theme to teach multiple subjects. This also allows you to teach multiple children and ages at the same time. You can keep a theme for a week up to a month. Some themes (for instance: Australia) are easy to pull in history, music, art, writing, science, languages and social studies all at once. You can bring in individual math lessons, using story problems that relate to the theme. You can create unit studies or purchase a curriculum. It can be used through the school year, or as a lighter summer course. You can make it as all-encompassing or focused as you want.
Pros: Ability to teach multiple children at once, connects the dots between lessons, interest-led learning, hands-on exploration
Cons: More teacher prep, can have knowledge gaps, easiest with younger grades
Unschooling
This style doesn’t mean “no school”. The focus is on “Child Led Learning”. Now this style can be stretched to an extreme, but ideally this would look like a child selecting a topic of interest and thoroughly exploring it – where it came from, how it fits in the world, how it’s made, etc. These families often do have a curriculum to fill in any gaps, but there’s flexibility in the schedule to explore other areas of interest and incorporate it in the child’s education.
Pros: Children are invested and interested, flexibility, high retention rate, learning as life, customizable to the child
Cons: Balancing discipline with freedom, more work and parent investment, potential knowledge gaps, lack of structure
Eclectic
This style uses a combination of the other styles. This lets you customize your child’s education based on how they best learn, interests and what you feel strongly about incorporating. This is a great way to have a solid base of the core subjects while using interest-based studies for the other topics to bring the subject to life with hands-on exploration.
Pros: Mixing the best parts of the other styles, structure and interest-led combination
Cons: Intentional focus to combine well, may have less rhythm with combination
Now that you have a general overview, you may know what you lean toward. However, if you feel stuck or want confirmation, I highly recommend using Rebecca Spooner’s Learning Style and Teaching Style quizzes to find how your child will learn best and how you would most enjoy teaching. She even gives you a starting point of the curriculum to consider based on those styles, though it is not an exhaustive list of what’s available these days.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
