What are visual spatial learners?

See this girl? She is a natural born artist. Constantly doodling on her papers, is drawn to colors, can SEE more than just green, yellow, blue, and red, she loves pictures! When she was little and we would read books to her, she really didn’t care about what the book was about she wanted to know all about the pictures.

Visual spatial learners are very visual. They are drawn not only to photos and pictures but to graphs, charts, movies, visual puzzles, using their imagination, and color.

If your child can read maps, charts, and diagrams more easily than text, enjoys art activities, likes to view movies, slides, or other visual presentations, doodles on workbooks, worksheets, or other materials, enjoys doing puzzles, mazes, Where’s Waldo? or similar visual activities, draws figures that are advanced for their age, and yes, even daydreams more than their peers, chances are you have a visual spatial learner on your hands.

Some materials and/or techniques that can be used to teach visual spatial learners are:

• telescopes, microscopes, and binoculars
• visual puzzles and mazes
• 3-D construction kits
• charts, graphs, diagrams, and maps
• visualization
• photography
• videos, slides, and movies
• art appreciation
• painting, collage, visual arts
• idea sketching
• visual thinking exercises
• graphic symbols
• using mind-maps and other visual organizers
• computer graphics software
• visual awareness activities
• optical illusions
• imaginative storytelling
• picture metaphors
• creative daydreaming
• color cues

Now that my daughter is in college, here are some of the things she does to study and help her learn:

• Writes down things she wants to remember using different colors. She also uses a great number of details when writing things down.
• Creates her own flashcards and makes them visually appealing to her. Borders around the edges, flowers or hearts instead of certain letters, etc.
• When in a lecture she tries to look directly at the person who is speaking to help her focus (instead of daydreaming).
• Before reading a chapter in a textbook she’ll scan and look at all the pictures first, then read the headings, then read the chapter.
• Highlighting important information with lots of various colors also helps her to remember concepts.
• Sketching and doodling while listening to a recording or lecture.

Do have a visual spatial learner? What have you found helps them learn?

Links to the other learning intelligences are at the bottom of this post.