Offer your visually oriented students ways to take in information. In history class, list the important events of a period you are studying by placing important dates on a time line. In science class, create diagrams of plant and animal life cycles. An activity that will demonstrate to the students their powers of visual learning is to place students in pairs. Have one student study the clothing, hairstyle and jewelry of the other. Once one student has memorized what the other looks like, have the observing student turn her back while the other changes one thing about his appearance. Then the observing student turns back to observe what change has taken place. Have the students switch roles and repeat.
Auditory learners benefit from activities that rely on sound. Have these students offer oral presentations rather than written essays or present science topics as issues for class debate. Music activities will offer any auditory learner a chance to shine, so consider adding music from a time period you are studying in history class. Play the classical music of Bach or Vivaldi from the Age of Enlightenment and have your students describe the music as it supports the ideas of logic and reason favored by the philosophers of the time.
You will recognize your kinesthetic learners by their preference for getting up and doing, rather than sitting quietly and passively in their desks. Add practical, hands-on experiments to your science lessons. Teach history and current events through field trips to significant locations and museum. For language arts and history lessons, you can provide a classroom kinesthetic experience through creating classroom drama. Study a play of Shakespeare and have your students act it out or recreate a famous historical event, such as a sit-in from the civil rights movement.
Though similar to kinesthetic learners, tactile learners benefit from specific use of their hands to create objects related to classroom lessons. Creating dioramas of historical events, building working models for science class and drawing pictures to represent the setting and characters from books read in language arts class all emphasize the strengths of the tactile learner. Have students create a comic book or graphic novel version of a book or story that the class is reading. Have them think of the story in terms of moments of action, so that each frame of the comic shows the story through visual action.