Visual Learning in Preschools
It is important to keep your preschool classrooms visually dynamic. Decorating learning spaces add energy to your teaching ambience because children are attracted to colors and fun shapes. Kids also remember things that they encounter every day: effectively setting up your classroom enlivens the area and aids students in remembering lessons.
By effectively setting up your classroom, you can contribute to the visual learning of your students. With visual learning, students gain and retain knowledge by associating concepts with images, illustrations and graphs. According to studies, this type of learning has helped in information retention, comprehension and organization:
• Lessons are better retained when verbal teaching is supplemented by visuals. These materials help you approach teaching in both auditory and visual learning.
• Since learning is a continuous process, children (and adults alike) understand new ideas upon connecting them with what they already know. The mind of a preschooler is like a new sponge, ready to absorb anything that you are going to share: post visuals on classrooms to help students relate new concepts to the past lessons.
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• Organizational skills are definitely developed visually. Flowcharts and diagrams are needed in arranging thoughts: it is a must to introduce simple diagrams to your students for early development of organizing skills. Create a simple checklist that they must follow, say for example, “What to Wear and Bring on a Rainy Day.”
Having these points in mind, balance the decorations in your room with educational print materials. Use images and illustrations in poster printing to help you in teaching. It decorates your room and acts as a learning tool as well. You can use it with the respective lesson or when kids’ attention fleets across the room, it may fall on to your visual aids rather than outside the window.
If you want to save time, there are a lot of readily-available educational posters in the market. You can choose among different topics — alphabet and numbers, shapes and colors, animals and a lot more. However, coming up with your own concept personalizes the teaching approach that you apply to your students. It adds creativity to your teaching style too. Thus, if you can, come up with your own design concept. There are many free stock photos in the internet that you can use to complete your design. Input a little more life into the regular ABC illustrations and make shapes more interesting.
You can place an image of popular cartoon characters instead of using generic photos. The cartoon character can do the “teaching” of the lessons (think Dora the Explorer in print). A key in making your poster design for your classroom is to incorporate all the colors you can — the more colorful it is, the more kids will appreciate the visual aids. Use big, simple fonts — these are easy-to-read and fun fonts that make your posters effective.
Remember that although technology and the internet have enabled both children and adults to learn from online and electronic resources, hard copy materials are still essential in classroom learning. Have fun coming up with your posters and students will sure enjoy using them for a long time.
A former web content writer, Halley Anne switched careers to being an Internet Marketing Specialist. She’s very optimistic for most of the time and impatient especially if she doesn’t meet her deadlines. She is currently working at a local outsourcing firm.
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