Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Gifted in LA but VS guy...?

This question just popped into my head while I was reading something else...
how does this work - I have a ds9 id'd as gifted in languages arts, but whom everyone, even the school sees as a very visual-spatial type of learner - does that in and of itself result in problems for a child?
or does it mean he might be gifted in both arenas (since he was a toddler I thought he was more inclined towards math, puzzles, etc., than language) ? His favorite subject is math.

I'm wondering if DS9 was strong across the board in Language Arts or had one area pulling him up...

Does he show signs of LA giftedness at home? Which ones?
Does he seem to handle auditory information or sequential information pretty well?

Say more?

Smiles,
Grinity

From what you described to me, I actually see him as both. Although he seems to have a prevelant "strong point" in mathematics, the parents (especially if they are the sane ones or gifted themselves) know their children best. Sometimes, the way the teachers see their students may be innacurate, but he could be both.

Violet-chan

Grinity and Violet, thanks for responding...yes, he does seem gifted in la, with reading pretty much the very highest but spelling is very high, but it seems the reason for that is a visual memory of the words. Seeing a word once is all he usually needs to remember it.
He writes well, creative and uses a large and varied vocabulary. I remember last year the teacher was so relieved he wasn't like most of the kids who get a big word in their head and use it 5 times in a story, he will change things up.

Auditory information might as well be braille most of the time, he's got to focus on listening if he's to get any of it; if there's a visual element or if he has to write stuff down he'll do great, but otherwise might really have some 'following directions' problems.

Strengths in math seems to be everything but computation, though he'll do ok in that, and does enjoy it when he's is not out of practice...he enjoys learning about the oddball numbers like infinity and zero, and how they behave, in order to amaze and astound people....anyway more of a concept guy, big on geometry, and we are looking at the life of fred algebra book this summer just for fun, and he's enjoying that and just 'gets' it.

Hmmm, that sounds like my kid.

He certainly is a visual learner, but he also sounds really strong in his writing ability. Not all visual learners are visual-spacial. It's just that visual-spacial was the first 'non-standard' learning style that became popular. I think that the value of the information on Visual-spacial learners will have reached it's full maturity when we have 10 common 'non-standard' learning types to choose from, and 6-12 descriptors to mix and match for the uncommon non-standard learning types.

He could be 'visual-sequential' just as easily. I think of the VS kid has having more difficulties writing a great essay, and putting together suspension bridges with toothpicks.

I'll bet your son would be great at writing essays for art history and art appreciation!

Smiles,
Grinity