My hubby and I are kind of personality test junkies. Know thyself and all that :). As a part of his sales training, he took several personality tests including DISC and we’ve both taken the 4 Temperaments tests and found out that he and I are completely opposite in every way. Like, it’s a wonder we can function together.
Anyway, trying to pinpoint the kids has been a fun exercise for us. By about 3 or so we could definitely see some personality traits that told us exactly the temperament that our oldest has and we pretty much have the 2-1/2 year old pegged too. But that doesn’t really help us to build her schooling. We have had some struggles for reasons that neither Al nor I could understand and had been looking for a learning style profile that you could do with a 5 year old.
And we found that in the book Discover Your Child’s Learning Style. There is both a preschool and school-aged version of the assessment in the book and they really emphasize letting the child answer. My 5 year old was a little young to take the school-aged version. She can’t read and so I had to read every question (sometimes multiple times) and then do the hardest thing. KEEP MY MOUTH SHUT. While the assessment took about 2-1/2 hours to finish, it was the most valuable 2-1/2 hours I’ve ever spent on school with her.
I found out that she is not as auditory as I thought, explaining why I had to re-read some questions several times :). And she *IS* very visual, but there are more than one kind of visual people and she isn’t the same as me. And she is a people junkie. The funny part about that is that the score can range from a -7 up to 45 (or so). My people score was -7 and hers was 44. And my highest area was her lowest, to the same extreme.
The book was not valuable just because of the test, but because it spent several chapters explaining what the results mean to how your child learns. There were several small things that I was able to easily do that really helped her to enjoy school much more. I found out that her whole people junkie thing doesn’t just mean that she needs to be around people, but that people in general interest her — stories about how they lived (history), scientists, biographies, etc. That has been super useful to me as a homeschooling mom.
The book isn’t just aimed at homeschooling families though, and has a lot to say on how using this profile can help you work with their teacher to help children do better in school’s too. Overall, I really loved this book and consider it one of the most valuable educational tools I’ve ever used. It literally took a day to take the assessment, another day to read what it meant, and another day to come up with some ways to tailor learning to her strengths. And it’s been fabulous.
You can buy a used copy of Discovering Your Child’s Learning Style off amazon, like I did. I think that Homeschool Buyer’s Co-op has a learning assessment based off the book that started 5/1 and they recommend ages 8 & up, which probably makes it much easier, but I’m glad we persevered through the whole thing. I was wrong in so many ways :). I highly recommend that every parent get this book and take it WITH their child. Very Very VERY useful.
