A Good Picture Book Helps Kids Learn Three Ways!

Some principles that can be helpful in ensuring that struggling learners maximize their capacity in school are: look for the struggling learner’s positives, don’t let what’s broken extinguish what works, pay attention to relevance, go for powerful learning, teach up, and see with the eyes of love.

Carol A. Tomlinson

Tomlinson’s attitude toward teaching warms the hackles of my heart. My goal in writing for children is to provide math concepts in the guise of an adventure story with auditory, kinesthetic and visual clues. Children learn by touching, listening and talking, and by looking. Walter Barbe, a pioneer in the study of learning styles, believes most children rely heavily on only one of these learning modalities. Maturity and experience seem to explain why more adults tend to exhibit mixed learning styles. “We are born,” Barbe states, “with certain characteristics that contribute to our later learning strengths. The experiences we encounter early in life, such as nutrition, stimulation and interactions with other children and adults, may also influence which learning channels will be strongest.” The wise teacher does not value one learning style above the others—although being able to process information visually does put a child at an unfair advantage in most classrooms. I love Tomlinson’s idea of looking for a child’s positives with eyes of love! I interpret that to mean celebrating children’s individual learning styles and presenting the same information in different ways.

I am an auditory learner. You suppose that’s why I’m a story teller? No surprise that unless I’m careful, when I teach I talk and talk and talk and talk. I remember one bright-eyed little boy who struggled mightily in my class until I learned to stand quietly by his desk at the end of a lesson and simply work the problem on a piece of paper while he watched. I had talked the poor kid into a daze because my teaching style didn’t match his learning style. I also remember high school geometry (a subject requiring visual/spatial learning skills) with some angst. The teacher would finish each lesson by asking, “Does everyone understand but Walton?” And sure enough, Virginia Walton didn’t understand. Maturity provided experiences to strengthen my visual learning modality. Dealing with my own visual learning deficit made me a crusader for providing information in ways children with differentiated learning styles can process.

For an overview of learning styles, I recommend two fine websites:

http://homeworktips.about.com/od/homeworkhelp/a/learningstyle.htm

http://www.ldpride.net/learningstyles.MI.htm#Learning%20Styles%20Explained

References:

Barbe, W.B. Growing Up Learning. Washington D.C.: Acropolis Books Ltd., 1985.

Tomlinson, Carol A. How To Differentiate Instruction In Mixed-Ability Classrooms. 2nd ed. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc., 2005.

Wandering the WWW in Search of Truth!

One witness is not enough . . . . A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. Deut. 19:15 NIV

To begin, http://www.virtualsalt.com/evalu8it.htm offers the excellent article “Evaluating Internet Research Sources.” My early Internet research brought the need for fact- checking even on reputable sites home to me in grim fashion and even though that experience would make amusing reading, I’ll not tell on myself here.

I will say the Internet has opened the world to me. I especially appreciate China related forums such as: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DragonSeedLegacy
http://asiawind.com
http://www.chinapage.com.

Through these I have met patient, knowledgeable people who have answered untold questions on their forums and I have found email friends from Beijing to Shanghai willing to answer even more questions. I have also met some cranky curmudgeon types who have set me straight on more than one occasion and to whom I am indebted.

The Internet Public Library features a convenient service called Ask an IPL Librarian in which the IPL's dedicated on line volunteer staff answers reference questions for visitors to http://ipl.org. This staff of volunteers is amazing. Whenever I ask them a question, I learn insider secrets of Internet research as well as receiving a thoughtful answer including all sources. After you have worn out your welcome with your local reference librarians, you can still anonymously bug these fine folks. Not that I would know anything about worn welcomes personally, you understand.

My most delightful Internet discovery (more about that later) came through the venerable search engine pioneer http://google.com , however http://freeality.com offers the choice of an astounding number of search engine possibilities as well as bunches of other useful stuff. It’s great fun to start there and spend the day chasing down research rabbit-trails. It was at the end of just such a research adventure that I met fifth-generation master Chinese puppeteer Yang Feng. Through his son-in-law Dmitri Carter http://nwpett.org I was able to ask this incredible gentleman questions about Tang dynasty string puppets for my fourth children’s book, The Warlord’s Puppeteers. Although this kind and gifted man died the summer before the book’s publication, he had left instructions that his copy—the only payment he required for his help—be personalized to his grandson. Additional information about Yang Feng’s life may be obtained from http://www.psto.org/yangfeng

If my world wide web research had only ever netted my email meeting with Yang Feng, it would have still been my greatest tool for getting it right for kids.