Some Techniques for Teaching Visual Learners Math

Because understanding the reason for learning is so important to visual learners, it is important to bring attention to all the ways math is relevant to everyday life. Bring your visual learner along shopping with you and be sure to have him or her help you figure out how much money you will need for your purchases. Letting them have a piggy bank, and counting the money often will also be helpful. Math is plentifully available in cooking together, clipping coupons, saving for a special toy, and even in building with blocks or cutting play-dough into fractional parts. Math can be almost everywhere when you are looking for it.

When it comes to more formal math instruction, there are specific techniques that will help make it more accessible to visual learners. Any of the following will not only make math more interesting, but will also help your child retain what they learn - - a common difficulty for those of this learning style.

Color, color, color! Mathematical symbols mean very little to visual learners, so especially in the early stages of math instruction, using color to differentiate between addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems can be very helpful. In learning sequential step problems, highlighting each step in a different color can also overcome this natural difficulty.

Make a picture. My son had incredible difficulty learning his times tables until we created a picture story for each pair he was struggling with. Once he could see that the frog (3’s) and the robot (4’s) had 12 jumping bolts together, he never forgot that fact again!
Use multimedia software when available. For visual learners, a picture is worth way more than a thousand words, so seeing math problems represented in 3D cartoon format is incredibly useful. Almost every children’s educational software publisher has created at least one math program for children. We were fortunate enough to find an entire visual math curriculum for our son through Time4Learning.com, an online homeschool program for elementary and middle school students.

Manipulatives are key. Visual learners (and kinesthetic learners) learn basic math facts much easier when they can represent them with 3D manipulatives. Blocks, cubes, legos , play money (or real money), and dice can all be invaluable tools for helping the visual learner to “see” how all the math facts work together.