Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School Interesting Drawings

Just curious if anyone else has experienced this with their kids. Our DS6 is frequently drawing these interesting geometric pattern pictures. They are always symmetrical and build upon triangular and square shapes. They are very cool and unique so the fact that I don't get the usual people and rainbows that seem typical of his classmates doesn't bother me. Curious if there are other parents out there that have noticed interesting artwork. He is lefty and scored high 99.9 % on the WISC-IV PR - so wondering if we should encourage math and/ or art development?

I've read that gifted kids like drawing these things called Platonic Solids.
http://www.vb-helper.com/tutorial_platonic_solids.html

http://www.mathsisfun.com/platonic_solids.html

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?...703570.2087889.1449484406&type=3&theater

Platonic Solids... I'll have to tell him that!

Some of my kids' first drawings of 'scenes' were from the top: maps of rooms with the tops of people's heads, etc.

If you have a kid who is enjoying math/art etc, that is enough reason to encourage it!

DS8 loved making dots and circles and then connecting them in patterns when he was little. He would sit there for ages with the magna doodle: dot dot dot, connect connect connect. I don't know if it's related but he loves math now.

I used to draw a ton of repeating geometric designs when I was in elementary and middle school. Math teachers these days might call some of them tesellations. Does the drawing encourage the good performance in math, or are they both effects of a high perceptual reasoning ability? I don't know, but encouraging graphic ability is something that could help him in a number of professions, including cartography, architecture, and some jobs we probably haven't even dreamt up yet.

You can improve the frustration/creativity ratio for him a couple of different ways. One of them is to search for isometric grids on the internet and print them out for him, or print one and copy. The kinds with just the dots, offset every other row are the best. You have no idea how much time I spent in middle school crossing two sheets of notebook paper, trying to get my diamonds just so.

If you have an iPad and let him have access to it (two huge ifs, I know), there is an inexpensive program called Inkpad which is fairly easy to use and surprisingly powerful. I wish I could go back in time and give that to my second grade self!

I started to add a little note here about how spatially gifted kids could help to advance big time research projects--as researchers, not subjects! I decided that one really needed to be its own topic:

http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....utting_Edge_Research_at_.html#Post140957

Ohhh yes I do.

Everyone should always encourage math and art development. What does being a lefty have to do with it, out of curiosity?

I always used to draw geometric pictures ... still to this day can't do more than draw houses, cars and flowers made of of squares, triangles, straight lines, circles and semi-circles! ...DS4 seems to be following in the same footsteps. I was a little child math wiz in elementary and middle school (didn't care much for it past that age) ... but never any arts other than music arts.

And here's an interesting video in the spirit of this thread:

http://vimeo.com/9953368