As a teacher, I spent a lot of money buying colorful charts and posters with alphabet charts, math facts and word lists to put on the walls in my classroom. I assumed they would help my students, just as when I became a parent, I thought flashcards and phonics games would boost my children’s learning at home. Well, now that I have discovered the neuroscience behind learning, I realize I wasted a lot of money. As I learned from Dr. Ellyn Arwood, who developed the theory and methods I now use at INSL LLC to help children read and understand math concepts, almost all of us (95%) use a visual learning system. This means that we need to create our own mental picture of ideas in order to process them for true learning. When we see a poster of meaningless bits of information, no matter how colorful or shiny it is, our visual system can see the images and can even recognize the patterns, but we can’t understand the concept of the picture until we have added our own layer of meaning that relates to our own experience or prior knowledge.

So, if a five-year-old sees a “c” above a picture of a cat, they might be able to tell you that they see a cat and maybe that the letter is called “c” and sounds like “k”, because they have been told that is the pattern. Yet, to be able to read and write “cat”, a visual learner is better served to draw a cat that makes sense to them, which may look very different from the image on the poster. Then when they label their drawing with the shape of the idea “cat”, their brain will connect the word shape to their own mental image of what they know of a “cat”.

If I ever have the blessing of becoming a grandparent, I will enjoy having lots of plain paper and pencils around, to draw, label, write and read with my grandkids. No flash cards allowed!