Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Visual Processing Difficulties with Gifted Math

Anyone have any advise?? Our child who is in math 2 grades ahead of age has problems with visual skills needed in geometry. He has already been identified with visual processing deficits, however we don't know what to do to help him in geometry.

No advice, but I suspect we may be in a similar boat with our DS5.5. I'm mostly posting to bump this up so that maybe someone else will help.

I do not know if this would be beneficial or not, however, I was just looking into "Hands-on Geometry" by Prufrock Press for our DD5.

http://www.prufrock.com/productdetails.cfm?disccode=02188&SKU=188

She does not seem to have a visual processing issue, but she is a "visual-spatial" learner when it comes to math.

No advice, but also looking for ways to help my 11 year old son who has some unusual visual differences that I don't understand but I know will cause problems in geometry. Problems like not being able to look at two angles of the same size and automatically know they are the same size, something I always assumed everyone could do. This little quirk even made it more difficult for him to determine which shoe to put on his foot. He could not see the slight difference between the right and left shoe automatically.

But he remembers the harder stuff like formulas. He loves word problems and I think my son will do well in algebra, but when he did Aleks middle school math online a few years ago he skipped the geometry. He can't avoid it forever. We are going to figure this out too.

The weird thing about his visual differences is that it doesn't seem to affect his ability to look at a word and remember the spelling. It makes no sense to me and I need to figure it out.

Lori, has he read Euclid's Elements?

The Geometry you mentioned is more nomenclature, ie labelling, not Geometry. The angle thing you mentioned is more to train slower kids to think about angles and what they mean. You son already intellectually grasps the concepts of geometric equivalence so his visual comparison skills are not needed to learn this idea.

The nice thing about Elements is that it is self-contained book of study - and introduces the idea of abstract thinking and rigor to young minds. And the language is quite quaint so given his ear for the nostalgiacal, he should get a kick out of it.

http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/toc.html

One suggestion is that should he like Elements, then it can serve as an introduction to learn either Latin or Greek by reading it in those languages.

There is also a flash enabled preview of Euclids Elements in Recommended Resources, Resource List For Parents thread (posted yesterday}. Look in Yr's 7-12 under Geometry from the land of the Incas - Angles.

I would probably start by giving him a comprehensive collection of measuring instruments and tools. But that's what my kid would get into, so I don't know if that would work for you or not.