I was reading about learning styles the other day and when I read about kinesthetic learners, boy, did I see Madison in that!

Core Characteristics:

* Sensory – internalizes information through bodily sensation
* Reflexive – responds quickly and intuitively to physical stimulus
* Tactile – demonstrates well-developed gross and/or fine motor skills
* Concrete – expresses feelings and ideas through body movement
* Coordinated – shows dexterity, agility, flexibility, balance and poise
* Task Orientated – strive to learn by doing

Students with a strong kinesthetic intelligence:

* Seek to interact with their environment
* Enjoy hands-on activities
* Can remain focused on a hands-on task for an extended period of time
* May demonstrate strong fine and/or gross motor ability
* Prefer learning centers to seat work
* Seek out other students who are physically gregarious
* Master a principle once they can manipulate materials that demonstrate the concept
* Enjoy group games and active learning tasks
* Are different from children who are hyperactive

from here.

Playing with cornstarch and food coloring

Madison has always lived very much in her body. When she was a baby, a sure way to get her to stop crying was to take her outside where the air was moving. She’d feel it on her face and laugh. She can’t NOT touch. She experiences everything through her sense of touch and smell (she is always smelling things although she is better about not tasting stuff — I am amazed that we have never had to call poison control on her). Reading that line about focus (“can remain focused on a hands-on task for an extended period of time”) is true, too, which is why I know she isn’t ADHD although folks have floated that out before after spending an afternoon with her. She actually has tremendous focus as long as she can MOVE and CHATTER. She talks back to television shows, can sit and color for longer than she can sit and look at books (books are so passive). She turns almost anything she’s doing into a conversation between things. Spoons and forks, markers, combs. Yesterday she got out my button collection and they had long conversations with each other.

She touches people a lot. At religious school, she fiddles with her friends clothes and hair without thinking. I watched her standing with a group of kids the other day listening to someone explain the rules of a game and her hand crept up to her friend’s collar and started fiddling the way she fiddles with her clothes (and our clothes) when she’s trying to sleep. She is always petting us and leaning in to sniff, like a puppy.

Her memory is amazing but she’s not reading fluently yet. She has terrific fine motor control but still draws some letters backwards. I was eyeballing this — I know it’s normal but her left-handedness and slow to start reading made me wonder but then I was looking at some of the writing of friends’ her age last night and decided to put the worry on the back burner.

She has been off-and-on interested in outside activities but she is more interested now and we’re exploring what might suit her. The things Noah did at this age (Junior Great Books, Chess) don’t seem like such a good fit for her so we’re thinking sports and music. She sings all the time while she plays and dances everywhere so I think music is something that organizes her brain. Because of that, I wondered if she would be good at math but she hasn’t shown any spontaneous math interest.

I told a friend yesterday that I find reading chapter books with her a trial because she is always asking questions about the book that are outside of the story (or way back in the story) and then I think she’s not listening (I have to stop so often to answer her) but she is. She hears every word even while her brain is running around all over the place. And she does sit nicely when she is being read to as long as you let her do a lot of talking. (This does not come naturally to me because I like to be IN the story and not constantly yanked out to answer questions. Brett is better at it.) She can hear a song or a story once and then repeat whole swathes of it.

I tell her often how much I love her energy and her need to move and we try to create lots of opportunity for it. We rearranged the furniture to open up the living room and give her more room to spin but she is at her best outside. When it was too hot to do much playing in the yard we all really felt the loss of that. She was much crankier without a lot of romping and the wading pool and sprinkler eventually paled. I have always though trampolines were tools of Satan but now I’m wondering about one with a net and then having our gym teacher friend come over and give her some safety lessons on it. She is a child who makes me rethink many of my absolutes!