Humanities and The Kinesthetic Learner
Are there any suggestions about matching kinesthetic needs in Humanities Classes?
Hi Molly - Thank you for sharing some really creative ideas!! Best wishes for continued success in your teaching career. Susan
The Humanities actually give you a lot of room for reaching all styles. Visual and auditory are actually quite easy because you can do selected readings, art work and music from the period or thinker you are discussing. For written word, you can generally adapt the methods used for your auditory and visual students to be a reading assignment or in-class reading. For hands-on (kinesthetic) you can take all the in-class discussion and readings you used for the other 3 learnomg styles and have your students create plays to act out or even have them create projects from the material. Generally your auditory and visual learners write something, your written word create new material from what is already written and your kinesthetic will build something or try out what the works discuss. It is really quite amazing to see this at work.
When studying a unit on ancient Greece, one of my Humanities student who was intrested in cooking, researched recipes for ancient Greek foods. To tie content to classroom experience we selected some of the simpler dishes he uncovred. He prepared a "Taste of Athens" buffet of three dishes which all the students sampled in class. This lead student then presented and dmonstrated the eating customes, available ingredients, and methods of food preparation. reclining postions around the table, and social status.
Hi Bobbi- Great question! You could ask kinesthetic students to create a video or a collage or some other project based on the topic at hand. Best wishes - Susan
Are there any suggestions about matching kinesthetic needs in Humanities Classes?
I think there are quite a few ways you can encourage kinesthetics learners in Humanities Classes. Role Playing is the immediate example I think of, also using flash cards. While flash cards seem visual or written word type learning, it is also valuable to kinesthetic learners because they have the opportunity to create, touch and manipulate the flash cards.
