A powerful aspect of learning that is often overlooked, or at least seems to fad out of practice as students enter higher grade levels, is nonlinguistic representations.

The fact is the more students use nonlinguistic representations to add to the more common linguistic representations, the better they will be able to recall information.

There are a variety of activities teachers can do to produce these nonlinguistic representations.

Here are a handful to get you started:
1. Creating graphic organizers
2. Making physical models
3. Generating mental pictures
4. Drawing pictures and graphs
5. Engaging in kinesthetic activities (activities that involve physical movement)

Incorporating nonlinguistic representations into your lessons can range from a quick activity to spark interest at the beginning of a lesson…to an entire lesson that involves various types of nonlinguistic activities…to week long projects…to simple homework assignments.

What’s great is that students enjoy this type of learning as well. Maybe because they don’t get exposed to it as much or maybe because it truly helps them understand the material better.

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