Hi,
Just found out I am going to be working with a student who has natural visual spatial learning modality and preference, but has a disconnect in his spatial organization and memory.
His verbal skills are intact, but not prefered, and not used naturally in learning.
Anyone ever worked with a student or have a child with this learning profile?
Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?
Anita www.learntoreadnow.com
Multisensory teaching
Well, as you know, I teach using concrete, multi-sensory activities. That way I try to hit the strengths and help the weaknesses. I end up teaching lots of students who are pretty much strong in visual-spatial activities. Weaker in auditory-verbal-sequential skills. And I have had a few students that are the opposite. But I believe this is the first time I have ever worked with this type of learner, so I want to know as much as possible.
This child was a month premature, but was only 2 lbs at birth. But had good muscle tone, and is good at athletics. But has difficulty with fine motor skills, and the Differential Ability Scales shows he has many problems with spacial orientation and memory. He is 12 years old, and struggles in all of his grade 5 subjects. According to the DAS, his best mode is verbal—low average. Visual learning is about the same. But spacial skills are very low.
I have worked with him a little bit, and helped him verbalize as he worked. But he has such an interesting mixture of learning styles that I just wanted to find out if anyone had suggestions for me.
Anita www.learntoreadnow.com
Sounds a bit like me and my daughter. I don’t know how serious this case is, and I have very, very strong doubts about the whole learning modalities analysis — a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies go on there.
What worked for us was straightforward *teaching* of visual skills — direct teaching of handwriting with a stress on direction, direct teaching of picture and graph analysis — don’t just expect the student to look at the visual, but go over it yourself, pointing out all the important elements, covering up some parts while concentrating on details, and verbally modelling your thinking process — and direct teaching of hand-eye skills including drawing, crafts, woodworking, calligraphy, etc. Also whole-body sports which develop body sense in t3D space (in our cases swimming, trampolining/gymnastics, and downhill skiing) helped an awful lot to put the visual and physical together.