Welcome to Our World: The Visual Spatial
When we first started homeschooling in 1999, I knew that my student was gifted and really thought it was going to be such an easy journey. Our first few months we used a purchased curriculum from one of the well known "homeschool friendly" curriculum providers. My student literally "sucked" that dry in a few months and was looking for more. I had pulled him from a private school that was well known for academics because he wasn't being challenged enough. I didn't want a repeat of that in our homeschool so we took a trip to Florida when we reached the end of all the books this purveyor of knowledge had sent as a "school year". While on this trip, I realized that my student really had a different way of absorbing ideas and had an intense memory for the obtuse details. Talents I didn't have, but I admired. When we returned from our trip I "winged it" for the rest of that "school year" using videos and trips to the library and museums. What I found from this experiment was that my student, for lack of a better description, saw most things in pictures and diagrams and learned things from pictures and diagrams where I saw the world as an ordered place and ran my life with lists and post-it notes.

It was over that summer I read two books: Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice & Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. both by Dr. Howard Gardner of Harvard University. These were very enlightening to me. I had read all the "gifted books" I could lay my hands on at the time and not one touched on the ideas Dr. Gardener had. Even if an author had tied the words "gifted and multiple intelligences" together, it would have been a help in our situation. I tried to use as often as I could, really visual resources in our learning experiences. Still, my student and I locked horns for the next three and a half years over what I saw as the simplest tasks. Multiplication tables from flash cards was a nightmare for both of us. They are visual right? But I could only try to impart the "stuff" I thought my student needed to know in the way I learned it....I read more books on how kids learned through those three years, In Their Own Way: Discovering and Encouraging Your Child's Multiple Intelligences and In Their Own Way by Thomas Armstrong were really good at helping me to eventually realize that "child led" learning was really the best way to go for us. It wasn't until I stumbled onto a website in Denver that I found a pretty good description of my student:

Visual-spatial learners think in pictures rather than in words. They learn better visually than auditorally. They learn all-at-once, and when the light bulb goes on, the learning is permanent. They do not learn from repetition and drill. They are whole-to-part learners who need to see the Big Picture first before they learn the details. They are non-sequential, which means they do not learn in the step-by-step manner in which most teachers teach. They arrive at correct solutions without taking steps, so "show your work" may be impossible for them. by Linda Kreger Silverman

At that point, I had my "label" and I could find all the good ways to bring the world to my student. There aren't many books written about the visual spatial learner, but after spending the last 8 years exploring the world with one, I "get" what homeschooling a visual spatial is all about. I can even write stuff now that makes me sound like an expert, though I know I am only an expert on how my student is. But because of the path I took,