Reading teachers who integrate pictures, clip art, and graphics into phonics and reading curriculum teach visual-spatial learners to decode and comprehend.
Students with a visual-spatial learning style think in pictures rather than words. For this reason, children with a visual-spatial learning style may have difficulty learning to read in a traditional auditory-sequential classroom. The following activities may help to engage children who think in pictures in the world of reading and words.
Phoneme Collages
- First have the students use a glue stick or white glue over a large letter printed on a regular 8 1/2 X 11" paper.
- Have students make mosaics of the letter by pasting small colored paper shapes, dried beans, small pasta, plastic bottle caps, buttons, or other small item
- Next, have students cut out and paste pictures that go with each letter all around the letter. Pictures could come from magazines or clip art.
- Hint: More advanced visual-spatial students may enjoy choosing their own computer clip art for the project.
- Bonus: Tactile learners will also enjoy learning with this project.
Computer Games
- Since visual-spatial learners think in pictures, computer learning games such as Reader Rabbit, Jumpstart Learning, or Interactive Learning Journey are particularly useful for these students.
- Visual-spatial students are notorious for having poor fine motor skills, but this shouldn’t stand in the way of their learning other skills. Allow visual-spatial students to use a computer to type letters or words in different fonts or to find clip art to support reading.
Recreating Letters
- Have students create words and word families with blocks, magnetic letters, tanagram shapes, or pipe cleaners.
Matching Letters
- Print out large letters or digraphs on card stock.
- Have students find match the letters or digraphs with words in a large print book (like those that are made for reading to a whole class).
Memorize with Pictures
- Encourage students to memorize easier stories or poetry from books with vivid illustrations.
- Run your finger under words in these memorized books while the child reads aloud. This will allow the visual-spatial student to make connections between the spoken and the written word.
Rebus Books
- Help visual-spatial learners learn to read by having them work "read" the pictures in a rebus book.
- A teacher, parent volunteer, or more advanced reader might read the words leading up to each picture.
- Create a simple text with large spaces for rebus pictures. Allow the students to draw their own representations of words in the story.
Puppet Letters
- Read aloud Chris Van Allsburg's book The Z Was Zapped: A Play in Twenty Six Acts.
- Have each student make a different letter of the Alphabet puppet. Puppets might be as simple as a large colored bubble letter taped to a dowel.
- Have students decorate their letters to match the words of the book. For instance, "B" might have a large bite taken out of it.
- Students will enjoy performing a puppet show for parents or another classroom audience while an adult reads the book aloud.
All in all, teachers who integrate multiple learning strategies into their reading lessons will find that all students benefit.
The copyright of the article Teaching Visual-Spatial Readers in Lesson Plans & Materials is owned by Susan Hyde. Permission to republish Teaching Visual-Spatial Readers must be granted by the author in writing.
