“This is boring!” You want your child to enjoy learning but sometimes it can become dry and lifeless. Use these lesson ideas to have FUN while improving learning and retention.

For a better way to teach your child, look no further than his talents. These natural abilities make learning easier and a lot more fun. Use activities for your child’s specific talents or cycle through all 12 talents to add variety to your curriculum.

I’ve brainstormed lesson ideas for world history using the 12 talents from the Self-Portrait Learning Style Profile to get you started:

Hands-On Activities

• Body Coordination – Skilled in sports, bicycling, hiking, typing, using tools, and sewing. Create a model of a roman city.
• Enhancing Daily Life – Enjoys cooking, decorating, organizing living spaces, and enhancing everyday places and routines. Cook cultural meals.
• Interactive Nature – Enjoys being outside investigating nature. Can easily learn anything related to nature. Create a mini-garden using plants from the culture you are studying.
• Interactive Others – Enjoys social activities, working in groups, interacting with others. Skilled at understanding people. Work with a partner to demonstrate a day in the life of an Egyptian.
• Mechanical Reasoning – Loves to figure out how things work through inventing, building, and taking things apart. Demonstrate how Roman aqueducts worked.
• Spatial – Skilled in drawing, copying pictures/designs, and knowing where things are. Enjoys jigsaw puzzles, mazes, and doodling. Create a diagram of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan.
• Music – Skilled in playing instruments, singing, easily memorizes songs, enjoys listening to music. Listen to period music and re-create period instruments.

Writing Prompts

• Word-Language Reasoning – Skilled in spelling, reading, talking, memorizing facts, and learning vocabulary. Enjoys discussions and different forms of writing. Write a poem about a favorite scene from the Trojan War.
• Humor – Loves to have fun! Skilled at making even the dullest activity humorous. Create funny rhymes to memorize not-so-funny facts.
• Interactive Animals – Skilled in interacting with animals. Easily learns anything related to animals. Research how nomadic cultures used animals in their daily life.
• Interactive Self – Enjoys being alone and working independently. Easily works from a list of assignments and completes tasks in own way.  Journal after each day’s reading.
• Math-logic reasoning – Easily understands math concepts, skilled at logic problems and games. Research and demonstrate math discoveries during a specific period of history.

Find out your child’s talents by taking the Self-Portrait Learning Style Profile linked above. The profile includes ideas for supporting your child’s talents in his school work.