Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion reading comprehension-visual spatial

I'm having my 6 year old do Handwriting without tears, a series of little workbooks that help you with handwriting in a painless way. Something to think about with that. He does a page a day, which takes 5 minutes, and it's helped ALOT.
My kids are math-y kids. Last year, my (very active) then second-grade boy who read above grade level but NEVER read anything, did our little school reading contest. You got little prizes for reading- he read 400 books or chapters in books over 4 months.
It really ignited his interest in reading, incredible as a it may seem. The contest is over, but he has gotten hooked on different series. There are lots of nice series for girls too- can you try to get her hooked on that? Maybe a little contest like we had could help.
My son is hearing impaired; he wears a hearing aid and has a documented auditory processing disorder. I make sight word cards, 10 a week, that we flip through daily. After a year, we've done like 450. It's a great way to improve his pronunciation of words, speed with reading, reading fluency, etc.
Could you try that? HTH

Why I think DD is visual spatial? She has the same abilities as me to remember scenes, even as a young kid, she pulls something out from years ago and places it exactly in context. And I have talked to her about her thinking. Since DH is that verbal, literal brain, that files facts like an encylopedia, DD is like me and her math skills are much higher than her verbal. Though her verbal is strong, she does things that I do with words.

I know that part of the problem is her speed of thought with the writing. With visual spatial you think of the picture and then you have to write all the words and here you are this 7 year old and have to print them all out...

And I had to train my mind to read and remember. I couldn't just read the words, I had to make a movie as I read. I can describe what happened on a timeline, figure out the year by events. And DD is like that. I remember forever. But I cannot remember names. It takes me a long time to remember someone's name. I have to hear it a lot. But I will remember their phone number, just once.

These are the pattern I see with DD. Even when I see her do her online math, the patterns and tricks she uses to remember the multiplication and division.

Thanks Master of None. Your experience "feels" similar to what I think is going on.

Ren

This is how I work, too. If I meet someone and they tell me their name, and it's unusual, I'll forget the name in under 2 minutes. I'll meet them time and again, and the process will repeat itself. Then one day I'll see how their name is spelled, and I'll never forget it. This recently happened with a new neighbor, until a piece of her mail was delivered to my mailbox by mistake.

Honestly, I think that reading comprehension assessments at that age are a joke. In early elementary school, reading comprehension usually involves too much of picking out the insignificant details. As I said in another thread, who cares what color the dog was? This isn't so much a visual/spatial thing as a forest/trees kind of thing... and I guess I've already exposed where I come up on that continuum.

I remember comprehension testing at that age, and it always felt like such a chore, because I'd read the passage once, then have to go back and skim it again for almost every question. It was consistently the worst section on my state assessment exams regardless... not that my worst section was a score worth mourning over.

Fast forward to adult life, and I'm the guy who keeps ruining mystery shows for my wife, and she still hasn't forgiven me for figuring out much of what was to come in the final Harry Potter novel, so I guess my comprehension is doing fine.