How To Use Your Child’s Learning Style To Enhance Bible Reading Time

It can be quite deflating to be excited about starting a time of family devotion, only to see that your child is more interested in the lint on the sofa than in reading from God’s Word. Can you engage your child in such a way that caters to his strengths and reaches the heart of his personality?

Yes, if you’re willing to examine what makes your child tick in terms of learning. We all don’t learn the same way. What works for one will put someone else to sleep. Observing how your child learns and then transferring that to how you do family devotion can go a long way to making Bible reading more engaging for your child, no matter his age.

Children (all people, actually) learn in three very basic ways. They are either predominantly visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners. There are other variables that also kick into play which you can read about in any number of books on teaching children, but we’ll stick with these basic three and learn how to make Bible reading more interesting.

Want to know what kind of learner you are? Test yourself to see where you fall. Let’s say you have an item in a box with the words written on the container, “some assembly required”. The instructions for putting it together are included along with all the parts and pieces. You would most likely:

• Read the instructions start to finish, maybe even read them a second time, then keep referring to them as you put the item together. You can look at the item and the diagrams in the instructions and generally tell whether it’s coming together correctly. You are primarily a visual learner.
• Ask someone to read the instructions to you, stopping and starting as you work on assembling the item. You can hear when something doesn’t make sense in the instructions, and you know that funny sound the item just made while putting it together can’t be right. You are an auditory learner.
• Chuck the instructions and just dive in. You like to figure it out as you go, and you generally have a fairly good handle on the mechanics of things. It’ll probably take you twice as long to assemble the item, you may get frustrated a time or two, but you take great satisfaction in figuring it out on your own. And you will know that baby inside and out when you’re done with it. You are a kinesthetic learner.

Children are the same way. They prefer to either see, hear or handle something to best learn about it. My experience has been that everyone has a predominant learning style, with a very strong second, but the third learning style is wa-ay weak.

My predominant learning style is visual with a strong kinesthetic as second. My husband’s primary is auditory with a strong secondary in visual. This means I have a habit of tuning him out when he’s droning on about something, and he is forever trying to figure out how to use the two remotes to our TV, cable and DVD player. Makes for interesting married life sometimes.

So let’s spend the next few days figuring out how your child learns and how to translate that to a more stimulating family devotion.

Related Articles:
Teaching The Visual Child
Teaching The Auditory Child
Teaching The Kinesthetic Child