Multiple Intelligences

I have a book that I have read from cover to cover several times, and yet continually pull off the shelf to browse and re-inspire myself. It's called Seven Times Smarter, by Laurel Schmidt, and it's about how to stimulate your children's learning through appealing to their different learning styles, as well as by helping them to bolster areas that are not typical to their own learning style.

The idea of multiple intelligences was proposed some while back by Howard Gardner. Initially, he proposed 7 intelligences - he has since added two more. The basic idea is this: we do not all learn, or express ourselves, in the same ways. Some of us are more physical, others more logical, others very visual, and so on. I personally learn better by reading rather than hearing, and I can take in new information very quickly if I read it. My daughter, however, learns very quickly just by listening (and is really good at repeating back word for word that juicy piece of gossip I shared within her earshot - a good lesson for me!). And this brings me to the main point of this post. Our children do not necessarily share the same intelligences as us. We need to understand their type of smartness, and how to communicate with them, if we are to really encourage their own intelligence rather than just pushing our type of intelligence on them.

So, over the next ten weeks we are going to explore the nine intelligences, with some ideas for activities for each. We're going to have lots of fun! In my next post we'll be looking at how to figure out which intelligence(s) your child seems most strong in.

In the meantime, if you'd like to read up more on the different intelligences, here are some really good websites to take a look at:
The Seven Intelligences at Literacy.net.
Concept to Classroom explains the theory of multiple intelligences and why they work well in classrooms.
Multiple Intelligences - a nice introduction with some ideas for encouraging the various intelligences.