The secret to motivating students to learn is by using multiple learning styles. Here are a few tips.
How can you motivate a child to learn? Motivation can be influenced by various components. Your lesson plan is a good place to start. Children have many different ways of learning and you as the new teacher, can channel your students learning styles. This ability and skill is especially important when learning skills and activities in ESL (English as a second language) as different types of learner needs various learning prompts which will ensure more reception of a language.
As a new teacher, you will need to learn over a relatively short period of time, what makes your student ‘tick’. This process is not instant and rests largely on catering for different learning styles.
This requires a great deal of sensitivity, skill and understanding on part of new and seasoned teachers. Catering for different learning styles is challenging as different students will require different ways of learning.
You will need to build a student profile of each learner in the beginning. One ways to do this is by distributing questionnaires for children learning styles, which will ultimately help you as the new teacher cater to the four major types of learning styles.
Here are a few of the major learning styles. Other learning styles can be incorporated into your questionnaire as well.
Here are some different kinds of learning styles that can be easily incorporated into your lesson plan.
- The kinesthetic learning styles.
This type of learner learns through the tactile response by touching and feeling. Providing ABC letters in different shapes and textures, blindfolding the children and encouraging them to make guess which letter they are hold reflects this kind of learning style.For older learners, try offering them a word backwards asking them to guess.
- The visual learning styles
Try motivating this learner via visual and non textual clues such as graphs, charts or media and assorted visuals such as a power point presentation or a general picture. Aim for age appropriate visual aids with stimulating and motivating content. Once the students have absorbed the visual aids (usually after a few minutes) you can have a question and answer session. For ESL class, predication is an effective technique to motivate some students to read.
- Auditory learning styles
Try using using jazz chants and sing-song approaches to introduce new vocabulary.
When you know how to cater to different learning styles, you will be able to maximize your chances for motivating your student. The ultimate payback will be giving your students the love of learning.
