Is Your Child A Visual Learner?

ProTeach Nigeria
Professional Home Tutors
4 min readFeb 2, 2017

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Videos to the rescue! A collage of study tips for visual learners.

By Lanre Yusuf, TESOL Certified ESL tutor and language connoisseur. Twitter: @lanreyloungin

Busola’s mind saw the world in shapes and colors. Everything had a visible shape-based representation and even smells or feelings had a ‘seeing’ equivalent. She literally interpreted the world visually. It constantly drove her lesson teacher, her mum and uncle crazy!! Until her dad came across the concept of learning styles during his early morning, drive-to-work e-news forays. The link was embedded in the news article he just finished reading on Ynaija! He clicked and suddenly the world was made straight again. So his princess was just a visual learner and not a special educational needs child! Here are the tips he found useful in helping her learn better.

Visual learners are those who learn best through what they see. They prefer it when information is represented in diagrams, charts, graphs or videos.

Is your child a visual learner?

Here are a few characteristics common to visual learners. See if they sound familiar.

  • Loves pictures and diagrams
  • Is good at reading maps and charts
  • Create strong pictures in their minds when they read
  • Like bright colors (and fashions)
  • May have to think a bit to process a speech or lecture

Study tips for visual learners

  • As a parent, ensure that you provide your child with lots of diagrams and charts relating to the topics or subjects they are studying in school. This has become so much easier as there is now so much educational material put in these formats. Visit sites like Pinterest or just a simple Google search using the ‘images’ option will yield fruitful results on these images to aid your child’s learning.
  • Encourage your kids to copy all the diagrams they can at school! If a teacher draws a diagram on the board or projects it on the smart board, remind them to draw it and label it accordingly. It wouldn’t even be too much to ask a teacher to include diagrams in their class notes for your visual learner child. These serve as a great aide memoire when revising or studying with them for the dreaded mid-term test or almighty exams.
  • Get them good colorful and illustrative textbooks. If you can, make sure that you get textbooks that use lots of diagrams and visuals. You can simply meet the librarian at your child’s school for recommendations on these types of educational resources. They significantly increase a visual learner’s studying ability.
  • Watch videos! This is the almighty mantra when it comes to dealing with visual learners. What’s fantastic is that there are now so many freely available educational videos online and they are just a click or phone tap away. Visit the Khan Academy, YouTube, Google videos, Twinkl and a host of other online portals for amazing educational content that will keep your kids glued to the screen and studying at the same time.
  • Invest in highlighters! Visual learners love using highlighters. They make things bright and colorful while making the important bits stand out. When studying or revising their school notes, encourage your kids develop their own highlighting system. Red for important facts, green for examples to back them up, blue for lists to memorize etc. Consistently highlighting certain types of facts in predefined colors will help visual learners sort out where facts sit in their heads.
  • Replace words with symbols or initials: this simple tip can help speed up the process of making study notes for the visual learner. It also helps them to associate symbols with concepts, rather than with words — increasing the strength of association.

A cautionary note

Unfortunately, most people don’t fit perfectly into one of the major learning style categories.

So what does this mean? It means that you and your child should explore different ways of and make a collage of different tips from different styles to form your own perfect studying strategy.

You can meet private tutors who understand children’s learning styles and can help them improve academic performance through ProTeach. Fill out the tutor request form HERE

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