Your Learning Style and School Writing Assignments

How often has your teacher told you to plan your writing assignment? It may have been a Pie Chart tool, or a List tool, or a fancy Head-And-Legs tool, but whatever it's called, whatever its shape, its purpose is clear: a story plan.

The trouble is, some people don't get inspiration from story plans. If your Learning Style is Holistic, you're not a planner. Asking you to plan your story before you put pen to paper (or fingers on keyboard) is as productive as asking you to squeeze a piece of coal in your fist until you get a diamond.

"Start at the beginning", is another favourite bit of writing advice. All very good for people whose Learning Style is Analytic. Analytic information processors like starting at the beginning and progressing step by detailed step to the logical conclusion.
Are you a Holistic or an Analytic writer? Find out here.

Carbon-friendly Learning Styles

Learning a Responsible Life Style

No matter what your Learning Style is, analytic or holistic, visual or tactile, impulsive or reflective, you will have heard of global warming, carbon emissions and their impact on your life style.

If you believe that your life style is ‘costing the earth’, you’re probably right.

• How much electricity do you use to do your washing, heating the house, surfing the Internet, watching the news on TV, having light in your dining room, cooking your meal, repelling mosquitoes and charging your iPod?
• How much waste do you add to the planet’s landfills?
•  Does your food come from the farm next door or from a country across the ocean? Do you know what its carbon footprint is in terms of transport?

 

Educational Aids and Toys - an Example 

Consider the latest toy or learning aid you’ve purchased. Chances are, it was made in a faraway country using a carbon-expensive production process. Chances are, it came packaged in a large box, a mixture of cardboard, plastic and millions of little wires to hold it attractively in place (the packaging probably took even more carbon emissions to make). Chances are, within a few months the toy will break and join its expensive packaging on the garbage dumb.

 

Learning Styles Are Environment-Friendly! 

Learning Styles from Prashnig Style Solutions and Creative Learning are environment-friendly. No carbon miles have been involved in their production, because the team works in a virtual office and it’s a clean process. The ready product was ported directly onto the Internet, so there was no transport cost. And because you can purchase our Learning Styles online from the comfort of your home, you don’t clock up carbon miles, either.

 

Our Offer to You 

Let us show you what learning tools to make at home (without the expensive carbon footprint) depending on your unique Learning Style. (You will need to purchase a profile credit to do your analysis online.)

The Secret of Stress-Free Homework with Learning Styles

You can't do it? We're here to help!

 

Would You Buy Your Homework Online?

It’s not a joke! The French are doing it already: for just a few EURO their kids can download answers to their maths homework problems. "It is shocking. It defeats the purpose of education,” said a secondary school teacher in Paris. 

 

Of Course You Wouldn’t

The point of maths homework (and indeed, of most homework) is that you learn by repetition. The human brain evolved to notice patterns, and we are biologically programmed to derive enormous intellectual satisfaction from recognising the rules that govern a certain type of problem. For example:

·        210+30=240

·        310+30=340

·        410+30=440

·        510+30=540

·        ... oh, you mean when you add 30, you just change the middle column? COOL!!!

 

Homework In Style

Creative Learning instruments for assessing Learning Styles identify 48 elements that you need to consider when doing homework:

• light
• temperature
• time of day
• need for variety
• need for a formal setup
• need for parental supervision
• etc.

 

What is a parent to do?

 

The Secret

The secret is our unique Learning Style Analysis. Let your child fill in our easy online questionnaire to access the full report of their learning needs and things that make learning harder for them.

 

 

 

Learning Styles 100

Did you know that there were at least 100 reasons to know your child’s learning style? To conserve space, however, we will mention only the top 10:
1. Your child’s learning style is the optimal way in which she understands new concepts.
2. A learning style consists of learning needs that should be met in order to ensure learning success.
3. A learning style also consists of learning non-preferences which - when violated - can lead to the child’s lack of interest in new material, failure to progress and disrespect for teachers and the school system.
4. Your child’s learning style can tell you whether she is a gifted student or an underachiever.
5. It can alert you to her likely behaviour on the Internet.
6. It can predict whether your child will be likely to develop a smoking habit.
7. It provides indicators as to whether the child could be in danger of becoming overweight.
8. Understanding your child’s learning style helps you turn homework into home-fun.
9. It helps your child build her self-awareness and increase her self-esteem.
10. It helps prevent misunderstandings and communication gaps.

That's only 10 out of 100 good reasons to purchase a LSA for your child.

Speaking of the number 100, it’s hard to believe that this is our 100th blog post. We’d like you to celebrate the centenary with us, and what better way than to make it possible for you to discover your child’s learning style?

This is why we are extending this special offer to you: buy a Learning Style Analysis (LSA) Mini Complete before the end of November 2007, and we will throw in the Learning Style Manual as a free bonus to the first 100 people who respond.

All you need to do in order to claim your gift is enter this code when purchasing your LSA MINI Complete online: 4CE6WPB.

Homework - too much and too little

(Continuing the Homework series - please see the previous post and its comments.)

My first school experience was in the Communist Poland of the 1970s. We started school at 6 or 7, and by the end of the first year we were expected to have mastered:
· reading a book with more than 1000 words of text,
· writing a page-long essay about topics such as what we did during the holidays,
· addition,
· subtraction,
· set theory.

Our homework in primary school began with about 1 hour in the first year, and increased by about 30 minutes every year, so that teenagers would often come home around 4pm and sit down to do homework which would easily take till 10pm by the time you hit year 10.

That’s clearly too much. And yet, when I left Poland at the age of 12, I could write a 3-page essay about the influence of the Renaissance on the art of the period, I could analyse a work of literature in terms of symbolism and foreshadowing, I knew my Greek mythology and non-binary systems of counting, I understood photosynthesis and could recite all the major rivers of Europe together with their tributaries.

In South Africa, I experienced a shock. Although my English was next to non-existent at the time, I couldn’t believe that the only homework we ever got was to learn a list of words for a spelling test or to colour in a map. The maths syllabus was about 3 years behind what I was used to... and all the tests were in the textbook, just begging the students to do them ahead of time in order to get better scores (that, however, would have been homework, so they didn’t do it).

When I challenged my parents about the discrepancy between the two education systems, I was told: “perhaps teachers in South Africa teach in such a way that no homework is ever necessary”. Well, I suppose in a way they were right. Teachers in South Africa taught a very minimalist curriculum compared to the Polish one.

So, what’s better, a good education or a carefree childhood? Is there an acceptable compromise?

We’ll look for the answer together next week.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to know what your child’s personal assessment says about their homework, please have a look at http://clc.co.nz/default.asp?page=lsas.