Introducing...
PowerTools!
A Question and Answer Opportunity
for our site visitors
We invite you to submit your questions about teaching,
parenting, or otherwise living with visual-spatial
learners. Your questions will be answered by Linda
Powers Leviton, a member of the Visual-Spatial Resource Access Team and visual-spatial learner herself!
...Mother of a gifted 3 year old girl.
To submit your question, write Linda directly!
Please see disclaimer below.
Q & A:
Dear Power tools,
I am the mother of I five year old boy who I suspect is a Visual Spatial learner. He has not participated in any psychological testing, therefore his definite learning styles and IQ are unknown. I am certain I am a Visual Spatial learner based on my research.
About my son: All through preschool he was very active and had a short attention span. The preschool teachers reported that he was good at puzzles and liked to look through books for long periods of time. When the teachers introduced him to alphabets, he did not learn them in the traditional manner. Instead, during the summer before he entered kindergarten, he worked on StarFall.com and learned the Upper and Lower case alphabets, including the sounds, within two weeks. He learned his colors by spelling them (Through listening to Frog Street) within one week. He started to read at the age of 5 years and 2 months. Many of the concepts that were covered in kindergarten, he mastered before entering kindergarten. This was exciting to my husband and me; however, during the course of the school year, his report card did not reflect his knowledge. During the school year, the teacher complained of his inattentiveness and energy. At home, he has to stay occupied and tends to like to put together different equipment. He stays focused for long periods of time when he is engaged in these sort of activities or working at the computer. Because of his age, (he entered kindergarten at 4 yrs. &11 months) and perceived learning styles, we are repeating him at a Montessori school next school year. Are these characteristics of a young child who is a Visual Spatial Learner? Will the Montessori school address his learning style more adequately than the traditional public school? Any information that you can provide me with will be invaluable.
Thank you in advance,
Extremely concerned parent
Dear Concerned Parent,
It certainly sounds like your child is a Visual Spatial Learner. You seem to be staying on top of it very well, and thank you on behalf of my readers for offering the program suggestions that worked with your son.
In general, Montessori Schools do a wonderful job of teaching VSLs because of their hands-on, experiential philosophies. They focus on math concepts instead of math calculation, they allow the children to participate in understanding process, rather than just dictating step-by-step ways of doing things, they usually have more kinesthetic approaches to taking in information (which sounds like it might be perfect for your son).
His activity level might be related to a number of things: if he is gifted, he might be bored; if he is a tactile-kinesthetic learner, he might need a more hands-on approach to learning; if he has some AD/HD, he will be more challenged when faced with sitting in a chair and attending for long periods of time; he is a young kindergartener, so it might be a function of maturity, so repeating kindergarten will give him a chance to accomplish that.
If he continues to have problems, an assessment would be the best way to evaluate this, but academically, he sounds advanced, so, just be careful not to mistake boredom (by repeating Kindergarten, he is relearning things he knew when he started school a year ago) for other problems. Perhaps the teacher can be enlisted to monitor his interest and suggest ways to engage him, when he already knows the material. Many factors must go into the decision on whether to repeat a grade-- size of child, social adeptness, maturity, academic abilities and achievement. Gifted boys are often considered immature because they are sensitive and cry when hurt; in fact, the is typical of gifted boys because their sense of justice, perceptions and feelings are fine-tuned, so they are easily hurt.
Hope this helps,
Best Regards,
Linda Powers Leviton MA MFT
Powers Tools
Dear Powertools,He is extremely creative and has many of the gifted characteristics. He has very messy handwriting but will dictate a book to us to write down for him, then he illustrates it. He seems to daydream a lot at school, doesn't finish assignments - even though he usually knows what to do. After looking into the characteristics of the VS Learner, I asked him if he thinks in pictures or words and immediately he answered pictures. He is very sound sensitive and cries at any movie we see. The tags on the shirts bother him and I could go on and on. Many people have told us what an exceptional child he is because of his social skills. To make a long story short - the grades are not good except science - A. Others range from B down to an F in English. The teachers at the conference last week are asking if we know of anything to help him in school - they obviously don't. He is extremely unorganized and have him now carry a chart with him to each class to mark off things as he goes. Getting to the room on time, having all materials, and completing the class work are included on the chart.
My son attends a private Catholic school in Houston and has been having some trouble since 1st grade. He is 8 yrs old now and in 2nd. The psychologist that tested him said he was extremely high in the abstract thinking.
I hope you can give some suggestions because when I picked him up yesterday he was very down about how he is the worst student because of his bad grades. He is such a joy to be around. He wants to be a manager of a theme park - he already has the park planned out with a spa with the best massages for the moms and kennels for the pets. He also wants to be an inventor. I hate to see any of this get dampened in him. I have considered pulling him out to home school. I also have a degree in early childhood and elem. ed.
I was wondering if doing the V-S Identifier at this age would help. I hope to hear from you soon. We love our son enormously and I don't want him getting the negative side of school.
Thanks
LK
Dear LK,
Sounds like you already know that your son is a Visual-Spatial Learner (VSL). The real question is "What should you do about it?" When I assess a child (I have created a type of qualitative assessment that looks at the whole child www.leviton.org) I put a great deal of faith in parent observations. I have yet to be misled in that practice. However, you are also describing what may be some twice exceptional traits. For instance, being very sensitive to sound and touch can sometimes mean a Sensory Integration problem, which can be addressed with occupational therapy. Daydreaming can mean anything from an attention deficit, to boredom with the pace of the class, to very high imaginational overexcitabilities. As you can imagine, when teachers jump to the AD/HD conclusion, the impact can be devastating and misleading. If you are interested in getting the most reliable understanding of his IQ, skills and potential learning challenges, you should have him tested at the Gifted Development Center, which is pretty much the Cadillac of agencies for identifying multiple exceptionalities. Check out their website at www.gifteddevelopment.com.
If you are willing to give the teachers at his school a chance to meet his needs, there are a number of resources. My experience with presenting workshops for teachers on this subject is that they are open to getting new ideas and developing more strategies, as long as it doesn't require extra work for them. Your first step, however, is to educate them; most teachers go into the profession because they are good in school, which means they were Auditory-Sequential Learners (ASL) themselves. So they have no idea what it means to think in pictures and for verbal to be like a second language, complete with translations. VSL 101, can start with Linda K. Silverman's article "The Power of Images," and/or mine, "Teamwork: helping Visual Spatial Learners Blossom..." It includes many practical suggestions to help teachers start to think about new ideas. Both are available for download on this website, under Articles.
Allie Golon's book for teachers: The Visual-Spatial Classroom: Differentiation Strategies that Engage Every Learner! would be perfect for a complete and detailed guide to creating a VSL-friendly environment.
For your purposes, her very practical and easy-to-read book, Raising Topsy-Turvy Kids: Successfully Parenting Your Visual-Spatial Child, comes from her own experience home-schooling her two gifted VSL sons and is both funny and filled with ideas and explanations, particularly if you are not a VSL yourself.
You are right to be concerned about your son's self-esteem suffering from his current experiences. Even the most gifted VSL's may not believe in their abilities because they learn differently than ASL teachers tend to teach. Allie's book, If You Could See the Way I Think: A Handbook for Visual-Spatial Kids, might help him overcome the negative messages he is getting and the negative meanings he is making about his performance.
From your description, your son is creative, ambitious, and imaginative. If you have it in you to homeschool him, that would be the gift that goes on giving. Allie Golon is also a tremendous resource in that area, and there are dozens of websites that can support you around selecting a philosophy of schooling that fits you and your son (believe it or not, there are several philosophical styles, and hundreds of resources for support, supplies, and content). Here is an interesting website that references the educational underpinnings of one homeschool philosophy: www.besthomeschooling.org/articles/lisa_rivero.html
It might take some research, but seeing your son excited about learning and motivated to expand his world, not to mention feeling good about his gifts, is a very empowering and rewarding experience.
Good luck on your quest...it would be a shame for the world to miss out on a theme park that included massages and a spa for both moms AND pets.
Linda Powers Leviton
Power Tools
Dear Power-Tools:
My 10 year old daughter seems very anxious about something, but she won't discuss. She had a difficult time at school last year, and I suspect it has something to do with that. Can you recommend any ways to help her get past this?
RK
Dear RK:
Sorry to hear about your daughter's anxiety. It is very normal for children to have anxiety over unknowns, especially if they have previous unpleasant experiences in similar circumstances. Additionally, many children do not like any changes or surprises, and just as you should warn them before expecting a transition to a new activity (i.e., "In 10 minutes we need to go home, so start cleaning up in 5 minutes.") Just the fact that there are unknown potential challenges can unhinge many people.
Really there are two issues here. One is how to get your child to discuss their concerns, so you can address them; the other is to prepare your child for a new experience (current and in the future), like a new teacher, so they are less likely to build up the anxiety in the first place.
Because this is a common problem among my client/families, I invented a game for one of them that can address both issues. I call it the "Solution Game." This is one of those games that are best played in a nonchalant way, such as waiting in a long line, on an evening walk or waiting for dinner to cook. The game involves imagining potential different ways of handling stressful challenges. First you make up a vignette of what "awful" thing has happened (after the first one, take turns, if your child is willing). Then you take turns trying to think of solutions to the problem suggested. The goal is to think of as many possible actions and/or solutions as you both can. Whoever runs out of solution ideas to the given situation gets a letter of the word "SOLUTION;" the loser is the one who finishes the word (as in the game "ghost").
Here's an example: You forget your lunch and Mom drops you at school before you notice. Solution: "I'd tell my teacher;" "I'd go to the office to phone home;" "I'd ask if anyone can spare a piece of fruit from their lunch;" "I'd always have money in my pocket, just in case something like this happens so I can buy a snack;" or "I'd try to imagine Mom remembering until she actually does." Obviously, there are endless possibilities for solutions, including very silly ones like contacting aliens. It's more fun if there are some far-fetched solutions. It is especially funny if both are offering very serious suggestions, and suddenly the parent says something off the wall. When the child laughs, the parent admits that they ran out of ideas; they gracefully accept the next letter, and move on to a new vignette. You don't have to evaluate the merit of solutions because the primary goal of the game is to give the child confidence that there are many ways to solve concerns, and that he or she is capable imagining them. If later presented with this problem in reality (or even imagining and worrying about it), he or she will evaluate a solution based on her needs and comfort level.
There are two secondary goals to this game. One is that, the child might feel comfortable bringing up the real source of their anxiety by suggesting it as a vignette. The other is that it builds up a repertoire of real solutions to problems by placing them in the child's conscious and unconscious mind. What is more empowering than having a stable of solutions to problems that never even happened? Often, this is enough to reduce the anxiety, and if not, it can be the start of the conversation around it. But, the normal caveat applies--if there is extreme anxiety, and it impacts the child's ability to function, you should get help from a qualified therapist who has experience with children and their emotional problems.
Best wishes,
Linda Powers Leviton, MA MFT
Power Tools
Please know that, due to the large volume of emails we are already receiving, Linda cannot personally respond to each one. She will, however, attempt to group similar concerns and questions and address those within this forum.
For those of you wishing to discuss specific issues related to your families or students, we would like to highly recommend you contact Linda for a personal consultation. Linda is happy to provide this service in person, in her Southern California office or over the phone. Her hourly consultation rate is $125.00. To arrange such a consultation or counseling session, please contact Linda and be sure to write, “Consultation” in the subject line.
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