Participation in the arts has been proven to increase academic performance. Art helps children develop essential learning skills and out of the box thinking. Art helps children think for themselves, consider multiple viewpoints and explore a wider range of possibilities. And while all of those are reason enough to support art programs for kids, there are some unique and very significant reasons visual learners need art.
So you have this great kid. He’s dynamic, smart, fun, curious, creative, and you love the way his mind works! Then he goes to school and they’re not seeing the same things you are. You hear he’s not paying attention. Not applying himself. Not keeping up. Not behaving. Then you hear – maybe it’s ADD ?
Without some extra help, reading can become one more thing our visual kids struggle with at school – and it can become a big negative at home. Here are some tips to work on at home to help your child be a good reader.
For most kids, a big stack of books can seem intimidating, even dry, especially for visual learners. Visual kids thrive when they are actively involved in the learning process and it needs to include opportunities for them to be creative.
Reading and writing can be a struggle for visual learners. Here are some ways for you to support the process of becoming successful at reading and writing.
As parents, we want the best for our children at home and at school. Their success in the classroom is directly affected by the way their brain processes information. However some students are not finding the success they deserve because they’re right brain, visual thinkers…
Standardized tests can strike fear in the heart of any man – young and old, but ever wonder why? It seems odd that a few questions that require a pencil dot on a Scantron Sheet, can bring forth such stress and emotion. This is especially true for visual-spatial learners whose test results don’t reflect their true intelligence or ability.
Testing is designed with a left-brain bias. Linear-thinkers with good short-term memory and deductive thinking skills are much more likely to score well on standardized tests, because they measure the way the left side of the brain works, leaving our right-brain kids at a significant disadvantage.
Testing time is here in many US schools. When my kids were young, there was much less emphasis on standardized testing and test results. Now schools devote much of February getting kids prepared for standardized testing that happens in March.
In some schools preparation is a review of material they have been learning in the classroom. In others it can mean a whole shift to cover material that they haven’t covered, but will be tested on. With all that’s weighing on test results; from teacher pay to school funding, there can be a tendency to stress. Parents may be stressed on what it means for their child. How might their child be ‘labeled’. Teachers can be stressed. School and district administrators are stressed – again because there’s a lot riding on those test scores.
There is a rather critical matter at hand in education and I want to speak very directly about it. The arts are being eliminated from our schools and testing is on the rise. There is a prevailing notion that we need less of the arts in order to make more time for the subjects that are being tested and for the tests themselves.
This line of thinking actually results in lower test scores and disconnected, discouraged, under-achieving students. Why? Because the arts, the very thing schools want to eliminate, are essential to the majority of the student population; not because art is a fun way to relax or express oneself – but because the arts actually fuel the brain. The majority of the student population are visual-spatial learners that NEED the arts to think effectively.
