visual spatial exercises

Critical Thinking Books has a couple of workbooks that are excellent. Can’t remember the title offhand, but they should be easy to find at the website (www.criticalthinking.com, I *think*).

Games can be very helpful also. Rush Hour requires a lot of visual spatial thinking. Tangrams and geo-boards would be excellent too.

Nancy

By visual spatial do you mean, the ability to conceptualize charts, draw pictures, maps etc..

If you do, you might want to try the exercises in Jerome Rosner’s book, “Helping Children Overcome Learning Difficulties.” Rosner calls this difficulty, visual perception.

My son improved dramatically in those areas after doing Rosner’s exercises.

Other things that help; Dot to Dot books, tangram puzzles, and tracing paper.

For general visual-spatial ability, you want to get out of books and into real-world activity. The things that are known to develop this ability are 3D motion, playground swinging and climbing and so on; sports of all kinds — if the kid can’t throw or catch, don’t just allow the failure to go on, *teach* the skills; specific training in body skills in things like gymnastics, trampoline, karate, dance, etc.; indoor activity building things, first with blocks, then with construction sets, then with real tools.

I agree with the above suggestions of 3d body activity (karate and gymnastics seem to be great at the 3D and body coordination)and Legos. Tangrams and rotational puzzles are available on Math Workshop by Broderbund. This software package has been around for a few years and is excellent. reasonably priced, too.

Critical Thinking Books has a couple of workbooks that are excellent. Can’t remember the title offhand, but they should be easy to find at the website (www.criticalthinking.com, I *think*).

Games can be very helpful also. Rush Hour requires a lot of visual spatial thinking. Tangrams and geo-boards would be excellent too.

Nancy

By visual spatial do you mean, the ability to conceptualize charts, draw pictures, maps etc..

If you do, you might want to try the exercises in Jerome Rosner’s book, “Helping Children Overcome Learning Difficulties.” Rosner calls this difficulty, visual perception.

My son improved dramatically in those areas after doing Rosner’s exercises.

Other things that help; Dot to Dot books, tangram puzzles, and tracing paper.

For general visual-spatial ability, you want to get out of books and into real-world activity. The things that are known to develop this ability are 3D motion, playground swinging and climbing and so on; sports of all kinds — if the kid can’t throw or catch, don’t just allow the failure to go on, *teach* the skills; specific training in body skills in things like gymnastics, trampoline, karate, dance, etc.; indoor activity building things, first with blocks, then with construction sets, then with real tools.

I agree with the above suggestions of 3d body activity (karate and gymnastics seem to be great at the 3D and body coordination)and Legos. Tangrams and rotational puzzles are available on Math Workshop by Broderbund. This software package has been around for a few years and is excellent. reasonably priced, too.