8 Great Smarts Book Review - Cave To The Cross Apologetics

8 Great Smarts: Discover and Nurture Your Child’s Intelligences By Kathy Koch

8 Great Smarts: Discover and Nurture Your Child’s Intelligences By Kathy Koch

Synopsis:

Koch gives 8 different types of intelligences all people, and children have and how parents, teachers, and ourselves can encourage growth in the one or two we excel at and grow in the ones we want to claim we just aren’t smart in.

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Review

There are two main takeaway benefits this book offers. The first is that it gets you thinking about different types of learning styles your child(s) might display. Roadblocks you might be facing in homeschooling might rise up because of this. The second is that it offers different ways to direct your children who might be struggling in an area with different encouragements or ways of addressing issues without the child shutting down and hanging his/her hat on “I don’t get it. I’m never going to get it. I’m just not smart.”

The eight types of smart styles that the author talks about here are word and logic smart, which tend to by your typical idea when it comes to thinking someone is smart. There’s also picture, music, body, nature, people, and self smart. There’s a citation from a doctor who coined these modes of learning but you’re not going to find scientific studies here to bolster these claims. Koch is drawing on her experience presenting these ideas to a number of people. So if you’re looking for more research to convince you of these modes you’re going to have to dive into a different source. I have to admit that there were some modes that made me think more that one area or another might be more in how a child acts out in a learning situation than in how a child might learn. Yet, this did not take away from the solid information and techniques. Also, if your child is acting out in learning situations in those ways and it’s not a learning style per se it’s not like the chapter or two won’t be helpful.

For each of the eight smart types, Koch follows a similar format such as what your child might be thinking, how that type of smart style expresses itself, how to communicate with your child to bolster that learning style, some pitfalls you might encounter, career paths of focus possibilities, and ways to honor God with that learning style. This is where I believe the book really shines. I read about a study that said that girls who express “I’m not good at math” and are told that “most girls aren’t good at math” tend to shut themselves off drastically from learning math in a beneficial way. This is obviously a travesty and what this book offers is different ways to communicate to your child to not take the “shut down” path for any number of subjects. In fact, it would have been beneficial to include more ways to encourage and reinforce both strength smarts, and also weakness subjects. The author talks about holding public speaking events where communicating to parents and children reveals a lot of good information to the children.

A few negative aspects of the book are a citation of a defunct website with a checklist to help identify your child’s smart style. The checklist seems to be important and the author admits that children usually have a main smart style and a secondary or more styles. Putting this checklist in the book would not have added much to the length and would also avoid this type of missing link from occurring. The book would have also benefitted from how to talk to kids differently when you run into problems and if those conversations would be different depending on the age of the child, e.g., elementary age vs. high school age. It seems also like this book is more geared towards homeschoolers rather than government school educated but there is some coverage of it from a government education side of things. Also, maybe the point of how these styles can be observed, focused, and corrected works best in a homeschool setting – and hey, I won’t complain there.

The book might seem straightforward and the main thrust of the styles can be gleaned from the titles of them, what the book excels at are those alternative ways to speak to kids who “just aren’t getting it” or who are learning differently than their friends. It also allows for expanding areas of learning left uncovered by many including economics, different science focuses, and revisionist history. It’s invaluable for those hiccups or roadblocks and doesn’t let the child, or the parent, hang their hat on a shutdown point of “oh well, you just will never get it”.

Final Grade