Kara DavidsonVisual learning is a powerful strategy for teaching students. It enables them to retain information longer than when they use aural learning strategies.
Teachers can enhance their visual learning methods by incorporating manipulatives, books, charts, and videos into lessons. They can also create visual aids that appeal to different learning styles.
Manipulatives
Manipulatives are used with children’s learning materials to help them learn and retain concepts more effectively. They bring visual learning to a classroom by making ideas visible and accessible to students in impossible ways with only the traditional method of using videos and charts.
They also allow students to practice a new skill or concept without waiting for the teacher to demonstrate how it works. This makes manipulatives an excellent choice for many different classroom settings and helps students develop their skills more quickly and easily.
Manipulatives can teach math concepts and skills, including place value, fractions, and patterns. Some popular manipulatives include base ten blocks, two-color counters, and fraction bars or tiles.
Books
Books are a great way to teach children about the world around them. They can also help children understand how to deal with different situations.
For example, picture books can help children develop empathy for people of different races, cultures, and abilities. They can also allow children to explore complex subjects like fear, grief, taking risks, and building friendships.
Books with fantastical contexts and anthropomorphic details may affect children’s learning and transfer of information because they cue children that the content is not relevant to real-world situations, which may be counterproductive in domains such as science or problem-solving.
Charts
Charts can be an effective way to organize information and help students remember it. They also help students with different learning styles understand the material better.
Visual learners often remember what they see more than they hear and benefit from diagrams, graphics, written words, and sketches. They do not respond as well to lectures, slides filled with talks, class discussions, or games.
Visual learners can also be easily distracted by verbal instructions or classroom chaos. However, this does not mean they can’t learn if you take the time to find teaching methods that work best for them.
Videos
When used with children’s learning materials, videos can engage students in a fun and interactive way. They also provide an easy means for teachers to deliver instructional material, allowing them to stop and rewind as necessary.
A video is excellent for teaching topics best explained step-by-step, such as math and science formulas. This helps prevent cognitive overload and ensures learners can understand and retain the information.
Forrester Research analyst claims that one minute of video equals 1.8 million written words. This is due to the video’s powerful visual cues and how it signals information to the learner’s senses.
Flashcards
Flashcards are a fun learning tool that makes it easier for children to memorize facts and information. They’re a great way to teach kids about math, vocabulary, shapes, colors, and more.
They also help students learn the process of active recall and confidence-based repetition. These strategies are vital in developing memory skills.
In addition, flashcards encourage spaced repetition, a memorization technique that suggests spacing out intervals between studying the same information again. This natural spacing can create a permanent memory for the information, whereas quickly cramming in as much information as possible doesn’t stick.
When using flashcards, engage your child’s meta-cognition and encourage them to judge how well they’ve learned the information. They may also want to set aside some of the cards they’re confident in and focus on the ones they’re less sure about.
