If you have read my previous post, Diagnosing Learning Difficulties and Gifted Children in the Early Years, you know that kids have different ways of processing information.
Visual kids have a combination video-and-still camera in their heads. They like to see things. Pictures, colors and visual representations of things are their main information carriers. These kids learn best and expresses themselves best using pictures, graphs and colors. To them, one picture really IS worth a thousand words.
Visual kids use colors, graphs and pictures to learn the sounds around them.
Here are some ideas that help visual kids learn better:
- Looking at colorful pictures and books – Choose books with lots of colorful pictures. However, watch out for comic books, because they create visual overload. Books with separate areas for text and picture are better
- Cutting pictures from a magazine – Some kids just like to keep their favorite clippings, sometimes in a special notebook of picture diary, show them off and look at them again from time to time
- Watching videos – Visual kids enjoy movies and videos with lots of color and movement
- Coloring – Nothing makes a visual child happier than adding color to some black and white lines
- Painting, drawing and making collages – Self explanatory, right?
- Decorating – Get your visual child to help choose decorations and then decorate the house, the yard, presents, the Christmas tree or anything else. They will tell you that what they do makes it look better
- Matching games – Stimulate your child’s visual ability with cards to match. Use color matching, shape matching, pattern matching and eventually letter and word matching games
- Taking pictures – With the advent of the digital camera, visual kids can run around the house and outside and take as many pictures as they like. They can even see them enlarged on the computer, show them off and share them easily with their loved ones
- Making videos – Same as above, if your digital camera can make short clips
Happy parenting,
Ronit
This post is part of the series How to Stimulate Kids:
- How to Stimulate Visual Kids
- How to Stimulate Kinaesthetic Kids
- How to Stimulate Digital Kids
- How to Stimulate Auditory Kids