You may have noticed that your children have totally different learning styles. Your left brain child tends to like workbooks and working on their own. The right-brainer, on the other hand, likes discussion, prefers projects to workbooks and tends to be a little higher maintenance during the school day, requiring more of your interaction time.
Since most curriculum teaches in a more left brain manner, focusing on auditory and sequential aspects, as well as writing, our children who are more right brain learners often feel left out, and even struggle with learning and retaining material using this same curriculum. Once we have identified the right-brainer who is struggling because they are stuck in a left brain curriculum, then we can tweak our teaching process to help these right brain children get in touch with the "smart part of themselves."
Common Characteristics of a Left Brain Learner:
Common Characteristics of a Right Brain Learner:
Many right brain dominant children can adapt to left brain curriculum without much effort. If that is the case, then no changes need to be made for this child. However, if a child is struggling to be successful in learning, then some accommodations need to be made. Sometimes just putting the struggling child in a more right brain friendly curriculum, makes all the difference in the world in how easy their school day goes.
Other times a child needs a totally different strategy to make learning easy. That is when we turn to right brain teaching strategies.
Who Needs Right Brain Teaching Strategies?
Dianne Craft has over 35 years experience teaching bright, inquisitive children who are struggling with learning disabilities. She received a Bachelor's Degree in Elementary and Special Education from St. Cloud State University in Minnesota in 1966 and a Master's Degree in Special Education from the University of Northern Colorado in 1990. Dianne lives in Centennial, Colorado with her CPA husband, Ron, and runs the private consultation practice, Child Diagnostics, Inc.
Visit Dianne Craft's Web SiteWhile pioneer homeschoolers managed to educate their children on lonely farms in obscure places using bootleg curriculum harvested from public school trash bins, today’s homeschoolers enjoy a richer educational climate than ever before. We can successfully homeschool our children because of the three C’s – Calling, Community, and Curriculum.
Read MoreMany times a child who appears to have great difficulty with focusing and attending to a task is really struggling with a sensory processing problem. The child's sensory system is not functioning correctly, resulting in errant signals. An example of this would be a malfunctioning sensory system that shouts 'pain,' when a tag on a shirt touches the skin. Another example is when a child covers his ears at fairly minor unexpected sounds, because the sensory system is giving the errant signal that the sound is too loud. This child is not just distracted by their outside environment, but is distracted by their inside environment as well.
Read MoreMany children who are not struggling have one or two of the characteristics in the checklists below. It is a matter of degree, and how it is impacting the learning process that we will consider in determining the needs of the learner.Many educators who follow brain research believe that there are four learning gates that need to be properly functioning for a child to have an easy time learning.
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