Instructional Activities to Develop Visual Spatial Abilities

Drawings

Draw everything (see Doing What Scientist Do. Ellen Doris, (199 ). Heinemann). Draw everyday objects, close-up, and far away. Draw cross sections of objects that have been cut, fruit, boxes, vegetables, gelatin molded in different shapes. Draw objects from feeling them through a sock or in a bag. Identify paths through mazes. Paths on maps, Paths created in Logo to create visual objects. Look for differences in drawings with discrepant details. Find Waldo, Where’s Waldo and other similar books. Observe visual illusions. Drawings from observing objects through a microscope, hand lens, telescope, or binoculars. Make drawings from another person’s descriptions. Compare real objects with photographs or drawings of the objects. Create logs of objects as they change over time. Drawing a plant from day to day or season to season. Drawing interactions of other objects. Activities that involve figure rotations, reflections, projections, and pattern recognition. Use of pattern blocks, attribute games, Geoblocks, Unifix cubes, Cuisenaire rods and cubes. Shadow activities. Brainstorm with drawings.

Concept Webs or Maps

Concept webs can be lists of related ideas and how those ideas are related. Idea sketches of what students think another person is thinking (thinking process maps or mind maps), or what an author in a book means.

Charts, Diagrams, Venn diagrams, Graphs, Maps

Have students make charts and diagrams of information they collect.

Draw maps or sketches from memory. Location of objects in space. Draw a map of the local store, draw a diagram of how your room is arranged, your closet. Draw an object from memory upside-down.

Artistic Creations

Have students represent a concept with an artistic creation. What would an artist create to express the concept of balance of nature, rain cycle, reptile, body system, rock crystals, pollution

Visual Imaging

Have students picture a voyage through a body system, through an object, a light beam traveling through space, a molecule as it is change physically or chemically, zooming from cosmic view to subatomic scale, traveling through geological time, erosion, arriving in a different environment.

Imagineering

Creating an oddball invention. Inventors Workshop. Observe a picture or projection of one for a short period of time and draw or write what you observed. . How to prepare a food dish from memory. Recount the steps of an experiment or steps in the procedure of solving a problem. Paper folding. Students imagine they are performing an activity or imagine an activity being performed. Visualize throwing free throws in basketball. Visualize an object being transformed, motion through space, trajectories of objects, objects being transformed by flips, rotations, or morphed. Create fantasy creations. Create a model of an organism with unusual abilities. Create a flower model with the greatest adaptability or ability to reproduce.

Models of objects such as ear, eye, steam engine Take apart an object and put it back together. Household objects, lamps, clocks, or other appliances.,

Computer programs to make objects or solve spatial problems.

Dramatization stories, the respiration process, water cycle, cell division, problem solving, mathematics concepts operations and concepts.

Photography take pictures to tell a story.

Video-recording video record images to tell a story. Create a drama, act it out, and video images to accompany it.

Dr. Robert Sweetland's Notes ©