Spectator, Listener, Doer or What Type of Memory Does My Child Have?

Visu­al, audi­to­ry, kines­thet­ic, dis­crete… Hor­ror — what ter­ri­ble words… In fact, every­thing is very sim­ple. All these words are char­ac­ter­is­tics of types or types of human mem­o­ry. These words mean the fea­tures of per­cep­tion and pro­cess­ing of infor­ma­tion by peo­ple of dif­fer­ent ages.
Visu­al — a per­son who per­ceives most of the infor­ma­tion with the help of vision. Let’s replace this word with “spec­ta­tor”.
An audi­to­ry is a per­son who receives basic infor­ma­tion through hear­ing. Let’s change this word to “LISTENER”.
A kines­thet­ic per­son is a per­son who per­ceives infor­ma­tion through oth­er sens­es (smell, touch and tac­tile sen­sa­tions) or through move­ments. Let’s change this word to “ACTIVE”.
A dis­crete is a per­son whose per­cep­tion of infor­ma­tion occurs through log­i­cal com­pre­hen­sion, with the help of num­bers, signs, log­i­cal argu­ments, dia­grams and oth­er mate­r­i­al of log­i­cal ori­gin. We will not replace this word with any­thing, since this method is inher­ent in adults, and is extreme­ly rare in chil­dren. This cat­e­go­ry of peo­ple is the least com­mon, and chil­dren, includ­ing school­child­ren, are usu­al­ly not typ­i­cal at all.

Such fea­tures of the per­cep­tion of the world around us appear already in ear­ly child­hood, if atten­tive par­ents take notes about their own child. At preschool age, these fea­tures play a big role in estab­lish­ing con­tacts between the child and oth­ers, in the suc­cess of learn­ing, acquir­ing new skills and abil­i­ties, knowl­edge, and of course the devel­op­ment of mem­o­ry. Since it is she — mem­o­ry — this is what helps us to per­ceive the world around us and learn. How to rec­og­nize in a child one of the three types of per­cep­tion and pro­cess­ing of infor­ma­tion? Often it is enough for par­ents to sim­ply observe and add a lit­tle of their imag­i­na­tion!

Let me give you an exam­ple: there are toys … there are a lot of them … and each kid choos­es some­thing that is most inter­est­ing to him. A child can choose one, the bright­est and largest or also bright, but small, anoth­er kid will want one that has musi­cal con­tent or sings and talks, and also wants to knock on a drum or blow on a noz­zle, and the third kid will choose a design­er or will sort cubes into box­es. As an expe­ri­enced moth­er, I can say that chil­dren most often have a “COMBO TYPE” … what is it? This is a kind of MIX of the VIEWER, LISTENER and DOER. It is this MIX that is fer­tile ground for devel­op­ment.

For a child, every­thing in this world is new and unknown. There­fore, in order to give him infor­ma­tion — any, use a sim­ple COMBINATION tech­nique. Give the child the oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn new things through all three types of per­cep­tion … This is very impor­tant and nec­es­sary when you explain some­thing to him or give him new infor­ma­tion. If you speak with him in dif­fer­ent lan­guages, then he can­not under­stand your expla­na­tion, that’s the point.

Exam­ple: The world of insects. You show them in pic­tures in the Ency­clo­pe­dia and talk about them, and you also pick up a car­toon about insects. You can use our old “Trav­el of the Ant” (dura­tion no more than 10 min­utes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVeNSDLKt‑c). Learn a short rhyme about one of the rep­re­sen­ta­tives — in our case, about an ant (it can be repeat­ed on a walk). And draw an ant in the album with gouache or make an appli­ca­tion “Ant”. Result: if you are with a child in the for­est, he him­self will show you an ant.

This exam­ple is the most ele­men­tary of my entire arse­nal. The bot­tom line is that even for the small­est chil­dren, you can use the COMBINATION tech­nique when sub­mit­ting infor­ma­tion.

Good luck and new ideas for your kids!