Originally Posted by snowgirl
Is he a visual-spatial learner? VSLs sometimes have more trouble with learning to read phonetically. smile

Thanks everyone. I've been going barmy trying to understand my son and think you've all finally shown me the light here. I've been doing a bit of reading about visual-spatial learners. Here's something I found on the web:

[VSLs] learn all-at-once, and when the light bulb goes on, the learning is permanent.

I have said, for many years, that DS6 doesn't walk until he runs. This was quite literally true when he started running almost immediately after he started walking. He never had to learn direction control and didn't raise his arms to balance himself at first, the way most kids do. He just took off.

It was also true figuratively when, for example, he started to draw. He didn't pick up a pencil or crayon until he was about 5 1/2, and then he suddenly started drawing quarter-inch high piles of pictures. This happened from one day to the next.

They do not learn from repetition and drill. They are whole-part learners who need to see the big picture first before they learn the details. They are non-sequential, which means that they do not learn in the step-by-step manner in which most teachers teach.

Again, this describes my son exactly. My other two do okay with step-by-step learning, but not DS6. He also prefers to teach himself sometimes --- swimming comes to mind, though it's not a VS thing. He has no interest in lessons. He was afraid of deep water until he was 4, when he suddenly decided (or realized?) that he had taught himself how to swim. The next thing we knew, he was jumping into the deep end and swimming to the edge of the pool by himself, with no problems. Mom and Dad took a trip to Heart Attack City at first over this.

Must visualize words to spell them

He was doing really well at spelling when the words were easy, and now is having a lot of trouble, especially distinguishing the orthography of words like "deep" or "meet" from silent e words like "home" or "cave." Has anyone else observed this trait in a child classified as a visual-spatial learner?

And finally for now:

Learns complex concepts easily; struggles with easy skills

We're always scratching out heads trying to understand how he could, for example, look at a skeleton and say "That's an amphibian" when he was only 4 and yet so completely fail to be able to do simple arithmetic.

(FYI, quoted information came from this site.)

Okay, I'm going to get the book that was mentioned. Thank you so much. I've learned a whole lot about my son today.

Val