My 11 year old son with motor dyspraxia did not fit any one learning style and I tried so hard to figure it out. When he was younger and we did learning style quizzes it looked like he was split evenly between auditory and visual learner. I was certain of only one thing when he was younger. He was not a kinesthetic learner, but then I started wondering how was he able to mimic people's mannerisms and act. The neuropsychologist said this might be a "splinter skill." So I guess now if my son does something he shouldn't be able to do or seems to learn something in a way he shouldn't be able to, I can just quit trying to figure it out and explain it to other people as a splinter skill and then they can give me that look that they give me when I try to explain that he is very smart but he has trouble learning physical things like dance routines that other kids find easy or the jigsaw puzzles that he refuses to do unless they are on a computer screen. He loves puzzles that let him use a mouse to manipulate the puzzle pieces, but they don't test kids' puzzle skills on a computer. I guess kids have to physically do them or it doesn't really count. He likes doing mazes on computer games, but you put a pencil in his hand and he won't do it. Just having the pencil in his hand seems to cause anxiety.
My son thought in both words and pictures. He loved learning new vocabulary and but I think he also thought in pictures. I think it was 50/50. For example, when he was 4 I told him I used to have trouble remembering the difference between latitude and longitude and he said he didn't. He just thought "launch-itude" and imagined a rocket going up.
He was a good enough visual learner that when he was 3 he saw a picture of algae under a microscope and a few days later in a different book he saw another picture of algae and he told me what it was. He either read the words under the picture or he remembered what algae looks like under a microscope. Either way I thought it proved he had a good visual memory. He could remember the way most words were spelled after looking at them once or twice, but his spelling ability was much better when he was tested orally or if he can type the words. He would make more mistakes in spelling if he tried to write a lot of words. It was like having to write took so much out of him that he could not do that and make sure he was spelling the words correctly.
My son was identifying letters and numbers before he could walk, but then he couldn't walk until he was 18 1/2 months old. He would get excited when he recognized letters and words and flap his hands, but he didn't have Asperger's. He wanted to read book after book and never ever wanted to do jigsaw puzzles because his body didn't work as well as his mind. He knew what he wanted to do, he just couldn't get his hands to work as fast as his mind and it frustrated him so much that he refused to do puzzles and I didn't force him. I didn't know I needed to make him play with puzzles even if he didn't want to. When he wanted to spend most of his time reading and learning, I thought that was a good thing and I certainly didn't discourage it. I wish I knew then what I know now, but even his doctors didn't seem to know anything about sensory issues or dyspraxia so my son didn't get OT or PT.
My son got a lot of practice at memorizing things because he has been in musical theater since he was 4 1/2 and he found it a lot easier memorizing lines and songs than those dance routines. But he reads through a script and immediately can restate the whole thing or at least the gist of it. He can't do it word for word, but he can do it with enough detail that unless you are looking at the script you might think he has it memorized. I always memorized a paragraph at a time. He does the whole picture kind of thing and then works on details. He memorized most of the multiplication facts by playing games on the computer and by singing them to familiar tunes. He preferred using as much mental math as possible so he wouldn't have to write as much down when solving math problems so he was motivated to memorize the multiplication facts.
My son was very good at math in some ways but would sometimes do math problems in a way that was different from the way the book showed (usually so he could avoid writing) and different from the way I was taught and although he could explain how he got the answer, I sometimes couldn't understand how he did it.
I do think you can be a visual spatial learner with dyspraxia, but a visual spatial learner with dyspraxia is going to learn a little differently than a visual spatial learner without dyspraxia.
I don't know about your son, but my son is more dyspraxic on some days than others and the inconsistent performance thing is what I am trying to figure out how to deal with.
My son used to be more of a perfectionist than he is now. I think he really understands that everyone has strengths and weaknesses and now, even though he has some anxiety, he doesn't shut down when faced with a physical task that he knows he will probably have difficulty with. He just prefers not to work on his difficulties in front of other kids who don't have his issues, don't understand them, and like to tease him and I think I need to respect that.
