Here at Momentous School, we are fortunate that our students have been learning about their brains every year that they’ve been in school. This makes it fun for us in fifth grade, and also challenges us to really up our game and come up with new ways to stretch their knowledge of their brains! 

This year we did an activity where we focused on each child’s learning style. This activity stretched over the course of several weeks, and each part built on an earlier part. We actually started at the very beginning of the year, on our home visits, where we challenged the students to think about how they learn best. We asked them to be thinking about that and to come to school ready to articulate it. 

When school started, We told our students that everyone has a different learning style. Some kids learn best by reading, some by listening, some by doing. Some kids need to walk around, or act something out, or read it out loud. We took a little 20-question online quiz (we used this one) and at the end, each student was told what was their best way of learning, along with tips that can help them learn. Boy, did they love that!

Next, we reviewed the parts of the brain they’ve learned many times – the amygdala, the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex – and we added in a few new ones, too. Like the cerebellum which helps with muscle coordination. That’s a fun one for kids!

We then asked my students to connect these thoughts – to think about learning styles in terms of their brain. We told them that we were going to identify the parts of the brain that we wanted to build. They had time to think about their answers, and then we typed them up and made this really cool display for each kid. We were blown away by their responses! We love what they said. Here are a few!