Reading Help for Struggling Gifted Visual-Spatial Learners: Wholes and Patterns

Most young gifted children, whatever their major learning style, have a burning desire to learn to read. Quite often, they manage to teach themselves on their own or to learn with a minimum of parental input. Before or during kindergarten, they are off and running along a fast reading curve that continues to amaze. While there may be a myriad reasons why some gifted youngsters do not follow this early reading pattern, two important ones need airing.

The possibility of vision deficits should be considered if an obviously advanced child is struggling with beginning reading skills. The field of behavioral optometry can help here. Young children are naturally far-sighted. The passions of gifted children-puzzles, identifying dinosaurs, Lego construction, etc.-often involve near-point work and visual stress. An examination by a behavioral optometrist who will review eye teamwork, visual perception, coordination of involved musculature, and eye-hand coordination (all of which are teachable skills) can rule out or document vision-related problems as well as evaluate visual acuity. Vision exercises, which should be done daily at home as well as weekly at the optometrist's office, can ready young eyes for the important task of turning print into adventure.

Another consideration may be a visual-spatial learning (VSL) style. Visual-spatial learners want to know at the beginning "all about" something that's new. They need an overview or framework into which to fit new material, or the details just zing past, noticed but not sticking because there is no relational pattern into which to fit them. Because of this innate need to work with relationship, significance, and wholes, many struggling visual-spatial readers have a difficult time mastering phonics, the major way that reading is taught at this time.

Research has shown the efficacy of a phonetic approach to reading, but that does not mean that children who are visual-spatial do not sometimes slip through the phonics cracks. Gifted visual-spatial learners may be able to learn "the sounds" of all the letters, but their difficulty comes with the sequential task of blending sounds together to form words. The process is often too slow for their minds, which are used to forming rapid assumptions (a picture-which is quickly scanned-is worth 1000 words!). They benefit from a process that uses the recognition and comparison of whole words. Such children can be readily identified with a teacher-made informal blending test: given the sounds of the letters of several words (including words beginning with blends), what word do they make? Or Subtest #4, "Sound Blending," of the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities may be used to provide a normed score.

A better way for these children is a personally meaningful Whole Word approach. Struggling visual-spatial learners do better learning sight words-a large number of sight words-before approaching phonics analytically. Because their feelings are strong, they most readily learn words that have personal meaning. The work of New Zealander Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1963), half a century ago, which she called "organic reading," still holds up in Whole Word teaching. She had each of her students choose words they were eager to learn, keep their words in a box, and do exhilarating things with them. These sight vocabularies grew out of each child's interests and feelings. They "owned" them and learned them readily. No effort was made to keep the words short or phonetically regular. What mattered was that the child wanted them.