ABSTRACT
From early in life, humans, like animals, must reckon with their physical surroundings. The visual-spatial (visuospatial or spatial) skills required to do so are tightly linked not just to geometry but to all mathematics. Chapter 4 reviews those skills most closely related to math, which include navigation, scaling (maps, floor plans), perspective-taking, and slicing (cross-sections), as well as two- and three-dimensional mental rotation (puzzles, paper-folding), mechanical reasoning (the effects of force on objects), spatial translation (chess, checkers), and intuitions about the geometrical properties of two- and three-dimensional shapes. The chapter also discusses the special problem of mirror invariance and left-right language in the early grades. Finally, the chapter reviews the language and gestures needed to convey spatial relations and transformations. Spatial skills are malleable (trainable), and the chapter offers abundant classroom activities to facilitate spatial understanding.
