If at first you don't succeed, don't just try, try again! Several years ago, we had Spanish-speaking friends visiting in our home. While we chatted, my husband, who doesn’t speak Spanish, started making friends with their six-year-old son, Jaime. Jaime spoke to my husband, waited expectantly for a second, then leaned into my husband’s other ear and shouted quite loudly, not realizing that what he was facing was a language barrier, not a hearing impairment. I’ve recalled that moment so often throughout the years. Each time a child is re-taught a concept when he didn’t get it the first time, I think of Jaime shouting in my husband’s other ear thinking that this time, with a new ear and louder...
Over the past ten years, I have learned about a whole array of classifications for disabilities. There are so many! One could get the impression that children are getting more and more broken, and we are developing more and more detailed labels for describing them.
By exposing children to different fonts while they are learning to read, we are teaching them to recognize the pattern of each letter. We want them to be prepared to read and recognize letters in every font.
If your child is a kinesthetic learner who struggles with math, it is very likely that there is a mismatch between the child’s learning strengths and the approach being used to teach math. When this is the case, it is actually great news because the teaching approach can be changed.
Reading is hard for kinesthetic children primarily because they learn by moving and because they think in pictures. And let’s face it: the way we teach reading requires children to sit still and try to make sense of a bunch of symbols.
