Visual-Spatial Lesson Plan Ideas
Ways to Incorporate Techniques for this Learning Style in Homeschool
Visual-Spatial learners learn best when they visualize concepts and create with imagery. Here are some suggestions on how to incorporate these into your lesson plans.
Being a homeschooler, you have the unique opportunity to work with your visual-spatial learner one-on-one. This opens the doors to adapting and customizing lessons just for the child who learns best with hands-on projects. Here are some lessons and techniques that you might try at home with your child.
Make a Video
You can help your child turn just about any literature assignment in his curriculum into a video. Once your child has read the story, instead of having him answer the comprehension questions at the end of the story, let him take those same questions and turn them into his own production using a video camera. You will probably see the excitement well up when he has the opportunity to plan a script (based on the comprehension questions), gather costumes (if applicable), and star in his own production. For fun, watch the video as a family.
It is important that although you are adapting his learning style to a particular lesson, your child is still getting the major points that the lesson is trying to teach. That is why it is strongly urged that you base the video on review and comprehension questions provided after the story.
Posters and Fliers
By you drawing pictures about particular concepts, you are helping your child use imagery to comprehend. For instance, making a poster about punctuation rules will help your child understand when and how to use a question mark properly. Hang the posters around the room where you do your lessons, and refer to them when teaching a new concept. See the example poster below. You can also purchase lively animated grammar posters that do a great job in reinforcing grammar with imagery.
Sculpting
Art doesn't have to be a separate subject on its own. You can incorporate art into lessons to help your child learn effectively. Giving your child clay and asking him to sculpt the Statute of Liberty is not only fun, but also lets your child visual the facts he learned about this monument while sculpting. When he is finished, have him give you an oral report on what he learned. Use this technique wherever you can.
Surveys and Graphs
Surveys and grafting are easy to incorporate into a lesson plan. Everyone has opinions, and your child's job is to find out what others think about things, and then graph the most popular responses. You can use surveys/grafts for things such as finding out about people's opinions on their favorite fruits and vegetables when learning about the food pyramid chart to finding out about presidents who made the most impact on our nation when learning about the presidents. This technique has endless possibilities.
Other Lesson Resources:
Combining these techniques into a lesson plan for a visual-spatial learner will help your child to grasp concepts and retain information in a way that he understands. Use these suggestions interchangeably to keep lessons fresh and fun. It does take extra time to plan on how to incorporate these techniques into a lesson, but the efforts are priceless when you see your child excelling in his work, and enjoying it as well.
Be sure to read What is a Visual-Spatial Learner? here on Suite101 for information on how to tell if your child is a Visual-Spatial learner.
