Book excerpt: Visual-Spatial Thinking for Advanced Learners, Grades 3–5 will teach students how to perceive and represent visual information, and to mentally manipulate objects within space. Visual-spatial thinking is a skill which helps students develop depth, complexity, and abstraction in thinking and inquiry. Working through the lessons and handouts in this book, students will develop spatial language, learn to visualize and mentally manipulate visual information, look at objects from varying perspectives, explore dimension, and seek structure in organizing visual information. This curriculum provides cohesive, focused, scaffolded lessons to teach each targeted area of competency followed by authentic application activities for students to then apply their newly developed skill set. This book can be used as a stand-alone gifted curriculum or as part of an integrated curriculum. Each lesson ties in both reading and metacognitive skills, making it easy for teachers to incorporate into a variety of contexts.