Search - In Their Own Way: Discovering and Encouraging Your Child's Personal Learning Style

All children are not the same. They all are smart in their own way and this book helps you see this concept and helps you see that they all have their own way of learning. If more people could understand this, our childen, especially those with learning disabilities, would have an easier time in school and with peers and teachers. Very imformative book.

If you have ever felt that your child doesn’t relate well to you or that you are not on the same page this book is wonderful. It will teach you how to both recognize how your child learns and then will teach you how to teach them according to their own way. It is an easy to understand explanation of different learning methods. Well worth the read- especially for homeschooling parents, teachers, or child care providers.

This book is FILLED with practical tips for teaching children in their own way. While the author obviously dislikes the public school system (referring to it as "worksheet wasteland") he provides lots of was for parents to work with school officials and special education teachers to help children thrive as much as possible. The author presents Howard Gardner's 7 types of intelligence, and uses it to show that everyone has different learning strenghts and sees the same thing (reading, writing, math, etc) in unique ways.

This book also touches on many topics including ADD/ADHD medicine-alternatives, homescholing, "unschooling", children with special needs, "better late than early", some Montessori techniques, and many more.

The author has filled the book with references to other books and many research studies for the reader to find more information on the topis of interest. Although, this book was published in the 80s, so things are a wee bit dated in that regards.

One of the most practical parts of the books is the section discussing how to teach children to read, using 7 different methods. There is so much more than phonics, or vocabulary memorization. The author suggests teaching a kinesthectic child to recognize letters by making them out of sandpaper so the child can literally "feel" them. The spatially gifted child can "draw" the words ('bike' with wheels and handlebars, etc). The musically-inclined child can sing songs about each letter or word. The book is a treasure trove of "alternative" teaching methods that should become mainstream. One of the author's points is that if educators looked at a child's strengths, instead of weakness (or inablility to learn using the linguistic and logical approach that public school soley use) then America's large number of "learning disabled" children would all but disappear.

I would reccomend this book to public school teachers (as long as you can get past the public-school bashing by the author), student-teachers, special ed teachers, and most especially parents and homeschooling parents to really realize that each child is different, but they CAN learn.