As a concerned parent, you can support your child’s visual learning style by choosing meaningful learning styles activities that stimulate and hold her interest. Although you cannot plan every family outing around the needs of just one child, it is possible to include fun family activities that will make family trips or special events particularly interesting and beneficial to your visual learner.
Try some of these activities to promote learning and enrich your visual learner’s development.

All the News That’s Fit to Print

Newspapers are still a great way of connecting your visual learner to current events. When you’re on vacation, pick up a copy of the local news and ask your child to find local events or explore funny and interesting items. At home, visit the newsstand together and let your child pick out a Sunday paper like USA Today, which has lots of graphics and might be more appealing to a younger visual learner.

Visit the Library

Get library cards for yourself and each of your children and make trips to the library a regular family activity. Today’s libraries are a wonderful resource for learning styles activities.

  • Help your visual learner find books that support his classroom work as well as fiction and age-appropriate magazines to suit his interests. It’s okay if he only wants to read  popular books (reading is reading); he will enjoy talking to his peers about  the books.
  • To find age-appropriate materials, ask at the reference desk. Or ask yourself some questions: What can my child learn from this? Is the subject relevant to his life experience? Is the language appropriate?
  • Encourage her to join youth reading clubs and contests like the Battle of the Books where prizes add incentive.

Share Her Gifts with the World

  • Urge your child to join the school newspaper as a reporter or photographer. This will hone her writing skills and encourage participation in the life of her school.
  • Challenge your child to submit his writing or photography for publication. In addition to school newspapers, yearbooks, and art journals, there are national publications for teens by teens (Teen Ink, for example). E-mail the magazine and request writer’s guidelines, free instructions on how to prepare and submit articles, poems, and photography, etc.  Some local newspapers also encourage submissions from local students. Call your local paper to ask.
  • If your child isn’t ready to share her writing or artwork, encourage her to keep a private journal documenting feelings and activities. This can be a written dairy or sketch diary, if they are artistically inclined. 
  • Have your child interview an older family member and write a short biography for the family to keep.

Play Games

  • To build your child’s vocabulary and improve spelling skills, play fun word games like Scrabble, Boggle, Yahtzee, and Pictionary This healthy competition will build test-taking skills and provide fun for the whole family.
  • Puzzle books boost brain power and give a sense of mastery. Solving all kinds of mazes, rebuses, crosswords, and word finds broadens skills.

Visit Museums, Art Galleries, Aquariums, and Botanical Gardens

Attend exhibits together. Ask your child to choose a display or piece of art that he particularly likes; then ask him to write a short essay or poem expressing how he feels about it. If he is artistic, encourage him to copy a painting in the style of the artist and then in his own style. If you go to botanical gardens, your child can sketch what he likes or take pictures that reflect his interests.

Family Historian

  • Encourage your child to take snapshots of friends, family, vacations, and home life.
  • Help her create photo albums or scrapbooks and encourage her to write captions or draw cartoons to highlight her adventures.
  • On family trips ask him to capture the event in words or pictures (or both).  It is wonderful to have a permanent record year by year of the fun things you did together. Create a travel journal or family newspaper to chronicle the trip. Remind him to record some funny little things that make family vacations memorable (like the time Dad locked the keys in the car.)
  • If you send holiday cards as a family, ask your visual learner to write an account of the year’s events and select pictures to illustrate them.

Plot a Course 

When taking an unfamiliar route, have your child draw a map and use it together to guide you to your final destination. Before a trip or visit to relatives, have your child read up on the places you will see on the way and share what she learned with the family.