All these actions help build neural pathways which control things like movement, sight, and language development.
For example, children start mimicking sounds which grab their attention.
Later, they continue tasting and discovering the world which surrounds them. They continue to move around to places they want to see. The brain strengthens these schematics and the child continues to develop.
Learning through speech
Between the ages of two and seven, language development increases with children learning to talk and understand more words and using more complex sentences.
This is a critical time to create a rich speech environment for the child.
At this stage, the more the child is spoken to, the more words they will use and learn. Likewise, the more new skills they will try, the more neural pathways they will form.
At this point, children can be more creative in how they play with objects.
For example, you might see your child using a big stick as a horse or turning a box into a rocket ship.
Social skills develop slowly at this age, as children are not ready to understand logic, reasoning, and other people’s views.
They often experience difficulty being around unfamiliar company and can likewise openly criticize or say what they do not like or comment on the behavior of other people.
Learning through logic
From the age of seven until middle school, children begin to think more logically.
At this stage children are able to make connections between things. They become “detectives” who are capable of seeing clues and able to connect them.
Socially speaking, children develop the ability to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and understand that actions have consequences.
At this stage, adults can support children by helping them think through things like the cause or effect of any event.
Learning through reasoning
Transitioning into adolescence, children start to think more abstractly and with more complexity.
They reason along the lines of “what if” and can picture the outcome of a situation.
Children are capable of solving and understanding more complex mathematics, learning chemistry and physics, understanding storylines more deeply, and discussing literature they have read.
Children can combine different kinds of skills to do more complex things like learn to drive or learn a profession.
The system of electrical wires in the brain becomes more complex with circuits that intertwine with other circuits so that all the skills can work together.
Main conclusions
New experiences help your child form neural pathways. Exploring the world helps the brain grow. Various learning methods and other strategies of intervention can help children develop new paths and acquire more skills.
There are things at each stage of development which you can do to help your child learn.
What you can do to help your child learn
– Study the techniques of effective learning. Learn how to structure text information, create “mind maps”, use the general to specific method, look for and remove mistakes, learn connected speech, and develop both sides of the brain.
– Work on motivation, interest, attention, and discipline.
– Improve memory and revise new information according to the “forgetting curve”.
– Develop imagination, learn to encode and decode information, learn to manage a working state.
– Identify the type of learning style (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, logical) and use the dominate style when learning.
– Do not give up. Look for ways specifically suited to teaching your child until you find one!
– Reduce the time spent looking for and choosing the best strategies and implement them using the program “Genius Child. Techniques of Effective Learning”.
Auditory, Kinesthetic, Logical, and Visual
“VALK” technique. How learning styles affect learning
V – visual A – auditory L – logical K – kinesthetic
Learning through speech
Between the ages of two and seven, language development increases with children learning to talk and understand more words and using more complex sentences.
This is a critical time to create a rich speech environment for the child.
We have five sense organs. The right, creative, hemisphere of the brain is responsible for what these organs take in. We see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. A clear image which is formed immediately by several senses is remembered automatically and without effort.
If we try to remember something unemotionally, without recalling or picturing what we need to remember, or if we read a book without imagining each word, each sentence, then these processes become boring for us and require a lot of effort. When we read schoolbooks we do not get any pictures, and therefore they are difficult to read and require more work. Meanwhile, any genre of literature creates a film or pictures, and we do not think about it how fast we are reading and do not spend energy forming the images in our minds.
If we talk about how information is received, it is important to know that each person has four clearly defined basic scales of perception: hearing, tactile, visual, and logical. How developed any given one of them is tells us what type of learner the person is in general. We distinguish between for kinds of learners: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and logical.
Learning styles
The largest group of learners is visual, ie., people who transform the majority of information into knowledge through sight.
Practically all visual learners talk using expressions like “Look”, “Let me show you”, etc. It is difficult for them to listen to directions of where to go, where left or right is, and so on. Generally speaking, they prefer to look at a map and only go once they are 100% sure of where it is.
Then there are kinesthetic learners who need to do something themselves before they can understand it. We could not teach kinesthetic learners to dance using our examples of “look”, “let me show you”, “watch how I do it”. Instead, they should repeat it themselves and master the physical movements, otherwise they will never learn it.
Logical learners understand clearly structured information and algorithms: 1,2,3,4. They only get a clear picture when they have information structured in this way. For logical thinkers, the surrounding world is clearly broken up into a hierarchy of objects.
Auditory learners are people who play with the tone, depth, and volume of their voice when they speak (all of which makes up the prosodic (intonational) side of speech). They love to listen and hear. Monotone, unemotional speech is boring and unclear for them.
Let’s look at each learning style in more detail.
We will look at a few criteria like how a person walks, they main way they take in information, what the easiest way to teach them is.
