Teach Your Teen To Drive With Learning Styles

Did you know that car crashes cause the most deaths among the USA teenagers?

Learning to drive is a lot like learning to walk. At first, you fall over. You think you'll never be able to master it. It's stressful, it's frustrating, it may even be dangerous. And then, one day, you realise you've got it. Driving feels like second nature, the car is an extension of your hands, your feet, and your head. You forget how steep the learning curve had been.

And that's just the thing. When you learn to drive, you have to learn a myriad of new skills, some of them counter-intuitive (like looking in the rear view mirror when driving forward), all of them difficult yet vitally important to your safety as well as the safety of those around you.

Some people learn these skills faster than others. It's all to do with a person's individual Learning Style. If your teens are a holistic processor, they'll probably get the hang of it all more easily: operating the clutch with the left foot while applying the accelerator with the right foot while changing gears with one hand and steering with the other and flicking the indicator with their imaginary third hand. If they're analytic, however, they might ace the Learner's License yet struggle to drive a manual car.

What other Learning Style Elements might help your teen learn to drive? Being visual, auditory and tactile will help, together with not needing mobility when concentrating.

Check here to see whether learning to drive will come easily to your teen. Also check what other elements can help them in their journey, like their optimal time of day, temperature, noise level, etc.

Maths, Girls and Learning Styles

What can stay-at-home parents do to help their daughters (or sons, for that matter) get ready for school with their basic maths concepts? Encourage them to play with blocks, according to Dr Maureen Woodhams. Listen to her brilliant interview here for other ideas.

Naturally, some children will be more inclined to play with blocks than others. It's all up to their unique Learning Style. If your child is tactile and doesn't require mobility to learn, blocks and boardgames are probably a good starting point. But what if your child requires to move around in order to absorb new information?

• Play detective: take them for a walk around the neighbourhood and read the numbers on the letterboxes. Ask your child to anticipate the next number on this side of the road and on the other side.
• Sing children's songs with counting and pre-counting themes.
• NumberJacks is a great video to watch with your kids... if they are visual. Allow them to jump around the room while watching to satisfy their need for mobility.

Find out what your child needs by assessing their learning style.

Creating Successful Companies

In the year 2012, you  need a lot more than just a PC and an unlimited access to the Internet in order to achieve in the continually-changing business world. Your web site may be the most popular link of the week, but if you don't understand yourself or your colleagues, you will fail to utilise your most important resources: the people.



Have you ever felt frustrated because your assistant takes such a long time to reach the simplest decision? Or because your best marketer never contributes during those early-morning brainstorming sessions? Have you ever wondered why you and your staff members are constantly under stress?


Such questions form just the tip of the iceberg. Diversity is what it's all about, and it has nothing to do with gender or race. We are all individual human beings and we all have different Working Styles. Some of us like working in an open-plan office, reassured by the steady hum of voices around us, others find background noise counterproductive. Some of us keep our desks tidy and make use of filing cabinets, others insist on piling their work on their desks and floor. There are those who have to know every single detail before making a decision, and those who require the overall picture first. Nothing wrong with any of those approaches, of course, provided we all know what we want. The problem, however, is that often we are not even aware of our own needs.

Do you know what makes you tick? Find out.

 

Learning Styles and Homework

Research confirms that every child has his or her learning style: that is, the way in which they best learn and memorise new things. “Children can learn virtually anything if allowed to do it through their own personal strengths,” says Barbara Prashnig, an international education expert. “We all learn through our ears, eyes, hands and body. But some children learn through their hands a lot better than through their eyes. And that means that they need to construct a hydrogen molecule out of sticks rather than just stare at a diagram of one.”

 Your child has unique needs and non-preferences when it comes to the way they learn and do homework. There is no such thing as a difficult learner - only a learner who hasn’t realised how to learn according to their learning style.

Here are a few examples of doing homework creatively based on your child’s unique learning style:

• Auditory - the child likes to interact verbally: Make a learning tape together with your child. Let her explain the new topic into the tape recorder.
• Tactile - the child has a strong need to use hands when concentrating or listening: Encourage your child to make their own memory aids: sculptures of molecules or board games depicting new topics.
• Holistic - the child needs to understand the whole idea before they can details: Convert the homework concepts to analogies and stories from the child’s own experience.

For more ideas, please consult the LSA Interpretation Manual.

Working Styles and Multitasking

Multitasking means working on several projects concurrently. Today’s technology enables us to stretch our attention over several simultaneous activities, like reading deleting spam in your email inbox while speaking on the phone to a client.

The latest scientific research indicates that multitasking - the very quality most employers seek - can lead to stress and burnout, which in turn leads to loss of productivity.

According to Dr. Etienne Koechlin of France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research: "The human prefrontal function seems to be built to control two tasks simultaneously. It means in everyday behaviour we can readily switch between two tasks but not between three (or more)."

Some people thrive on doing little bits here and little bits there, others need to see a task to its end before moving on to something new. It all depends on your own unique Working Style. 

Are you the type of person who prefers to work sequentially or simultaneously? Find out.