published on or around the 15th of the month
from the author of www.brightkidsathome.com
April, 2007    volume 1- Issue 7

Welcome to Our World: The Gifted Visual Spatial
by Amy Cortez, Editor - The Eclectic Telegraph

When we first started homeschooling in 1999, I knew that my student was gifted and really thought it was going to be such an easy journey. Our first few months we used a purchased curriculum from one of the more well known "homeschool friendly" curriculum providers. My student literally "sucked" that dry in a few months and was looking for more. I had pulled him from a private school that was well known for academics because he wasn't being challenged enough. I didn't want a repeat of that in our homeschool so we took a trip to Florida when we reached the end of all the books this purveyor of knowledge had sent as a "school year". While on this trip, I realized that my student really had a different way of absorbing ideas and had an intense memory for the obtuse details. Talents I didn't have, but I admired.. When we returned from our trip I "winged it" for the rest of that "school year" using videos and trips to the library and museums. What I found from this experiment was that my student, for lack of a better description, saw most things in pictures and diagrams and learned things from pictures and diagrams where I saw the world as an ordered place and ran my life with lists and post-it notes.

It was over that summer I read two books: Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice & Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. both by Dr. Howard Gardner of Harvard University. These were very enlightening to me. I had read all the "gifted books" I could lay my hands on at the time and not one touched on the ideas Dr. Gardner had. Even if an author had tied the words "gifted and multiple intelligences" together, it would have been a help in our situation. I tried to use as often as I could, really visual resources in our learning experiences. Still, my student and I locked horns for the next three and a half years over what I saw as the simplest tasks. Multiplication tables from flash cards was a nightmare for both of us. They are visual right? But I could only try to impart the "stuff" I thought my student needed to know in the way I learned it....I read more books on how kids learned through those years, In Their Own Way: Discovering and Encouraging Your Child's Multiple Intelligences and In Their Own Way by Thomas Armstrong were really good at helping me to eventually realize that "child led" learning was really the best way to go for us. It wasn't until I stumbled onto a website in Denver that I found a pretty good description of my student:

The visual spatial learner thrives on complexity, yet struggles with easy material; loves difficult puzzles, but hates drill and repetition; is great at geometry and physics, but poor at phonics and spelling. She has keen visual memory, but poor auditory memory; is creative and imaginative, but inattentive in class; is a systems thinker, all the while disorganized, forgets the details. He excels in math analysis, but is poor at calculation; has high reading comprehension, but low word recognition; has an excellent sense of humor, and performs poorly on timed tests. by Linda Kreger Silverman

At that point, I had my "label" and I could find all the good ways to bring the world to my student. There aren't many books written on the visual spatial learner, but after spending the last 8 years exploring the world with one, I "get" what homeschooling a visual spatial is all about. I can even write stuff now that makes me sound like an expert, though I know I am only an expert on how my student is. But because of the path I took, I would wager it is similar to the path many other homeschooling parents stumble along with a gifted visual spatial. I have gathered a bit of understanding in what it means to homeschool a visual spatial.

How I Arrived at Our “Gifted” Homeschool Method

I found that there are four elements in getting your student interested and invested in his own personal academic outcome. These elements add up to your "method". It's not really all that complicated, but these four items are important:

1. Recognize how your student learns
2. Recognize how you learn
3. Determine the best style to present opportunities for your student to learn.
4. Take on the role of mentor and let your gifted student be the student and the teacher.


I am mostly a verbal-sequential learner(auditory-sequential). My student’s dominant learning style leans towards a global, visual style. It wasn't’t until my student was age 11, that we were actually aware of a label for his learning style: Visual Spatial.

A verbal-sequential learner and a visual-spatial learner are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Linda Kreger Silverman describes this beautifully in her book Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual Spatial Learner" :

There appear to be two major ways of learning:auditory-sequential (more left hemisphere) and visual-spatial (more right hemisphere). Auditory-sequential learners are good listeners, learn well in a step-by-step process, tend to be rapid processors of information and are generally able to express themselves verbally. They are often able to compartmentalize their reasoning from their emotions.

In contrast, visual-spatial learners are excellent observers, comprehend holistically -may have sudden “Aha!” understanding that leaps over steps - appear to think in images, may need translation time to put their ideas into words and sometimes have word retrieval problems. Their thinking and emotions are very intertwined.


My student is also more of an introvert. So he’s a visual-spatial-introverted learner. I am mostly a verbal-sequential-extraverted learner. This combination made for an interesting couple of years in our homeschool.

Early on in our homeschool journey, I recognized that a couple of “gifted” traits or tendencies in my student worked well as themes for our homeschool.

My student... has an evolved sense of humor & takes pleasure in thinking divergently.

It was recognizing these themes that helped me through those early years before I realized the importance of recognizing learning style and personality. With the ever changing environment you have with a gifted student, you just may hit some frustrating dead ends. So recognizing these themes and utilizing strategies that follow those ideas can help. In our homeschool, these themes have dominated most of our strides forward and have helped transform dead end paths to forks in the road again and again.

So to total it all up, we use a mix of eclectic-unschooling-school-at-home.


Here’s a magic formula:

Homeschool Method = [(student’s dominant learning style) + (teacher dominant learning style)] + [(student’s personality) + (teacher personality)] / (theme(s))

Here's how we plug in what we know about ourselves to get our "method":

eclectic-unschooling-school-at-home = [(global, visual style) + (verbal-sequential)] + [(introvert) + (extravert)] / (humor+divergent-thinking)

Got it?

The import ant idea to get from this discussion is that your homeschooling method will be more successful, and you will experience less frustration, if you take a little time to understand your own personality type and learning style and your student’s.

I have declared April to be "Visual Spatial" month, in honor of my visual spatial's birthday being in April. We'll celebrate his birthday the way we always do, but there will be some extra movie and other visual things thrown in for the sake of "Visual Spatial" Month. I have "squirreled so much information on this topic, I even added a new page to our website called: "Welcome to Our World: The Visual Spatial" which is where a lot of the text you just read came from. That page also includes resources and successful techniques we have used. There's a link from that page to a listing of the "stuff" I am done using and is for sale to any other family homeschooling a visual spatial.


How do I homeschool my gifted student?
by Amy Cortez, Editor - The Eclectic Telegraph

Well, now, there's a question. If you have a gifted child you already know how intense life can be. If you're just finding out that your child is gifted, hang on for an exciting ride. There's a lot of advice from experts available these days about kids, even about gifted kids. What I have learned is that no matter what the "experts" have to say, until they actually have the field experience with your gifted student, their advice can really only be viewed as "guidelines". There's not a "how-to" manual anywhere for your particular situation, but you can gather as much information as you can to help you make your own situation work splendidly. There are some common threads with most gifted kids, at least that's what I've gathered and witnessed. As part of your "how-to" lesson here, pick one or two of these characteristics to keep in the back of your mind that you use as "themes" in your homeschool....[read on]

 

 

 

 


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Updated: April 16, 2007