The capacity of a brain to produce a sense of what the eyes see is visual perception. It is different from visual acuity, which determines how well an individual sees. Even if a person has excellent vision, they may struggle with visual perceptual processing. Consequently, it is a good idea to train people with these abilities as a child itself. In schools or at home, these little learners may engage in enticing games or activities to relish and ameliorate visual perception effortlessly. In this article, we will discuss more visual perception abilities and wind up without crafts choices for your little one.
Where does visual perception help kids?
Here are some types of visual perceptual skills and how they help. In this section, we will look at their impact on daily life.
1. Visual Discrimination: It enables a person to detect nominal differences between two objects. It explicitly assists children in reading without making any errors in similar-looking alphabets. For example, they can outline the differences between alphabets such as b and d, m and w, p and q, etc.
2. Visual Closure: It aids in making sense of a partly seeable object or picture. For example, an individual can identify another person simply by taking a glimpse of half of their face. It aids in decoding and reading the terms and paragraphs more fluently.
3. Form Constancy: An individual must understand that a form or shape does not change regardless of the environment. For instance, a number, an alphabet, a shape in a book, or any other printed format will hold on to the same concepts.
4. Figure-Ground Perception: It enables a person to see things from a messy or busy backdrop. For example, this skill assists a child in not losing their place when reading or writing and copying from the board.
5. Visual Memory and Visual Sequential Memory: Visual memory skills are necessary for remembering sight words, and visual sequential memory skills can assist you in retaining the order of letters for spelling. It aids in the formation of words and sentences.
6. Visual-Motor Integration: The visual-motor integration skill aids in conducting regular tasks. It can help your kid learn better. For example, a kid can learn to do regular tasks like applying toothpaste on the toothbrush, sewing a thread through a needle, etc.
How we crafted these campaigns- Securing necessary attributes for visual perception activities
While visual perception may initially sound straightforward, there are multiple aspects under this umbrella. The games and activities that were stated below often ensure to address and ameliorate these traits. Not only with our choices, one may need to verify and warrant these traits while choosing any Visio-perception activity:
- Insight of colors: By vision, one may discern that the abilities are related to physical attributes like size, shape, and color. Accordingly, identifying the object with its hue may be a fundamental yet crucial part. Most of the activities we crafted ensure that the little ones classify things based on their shades.
- Attention: To remark on various details of an object, being alert during the activity may be pivotal. With this view, all of the activities that we have depicted often can be stipulated within a time span, ensuring them to be attentive.
- Spatial awareness and Relationships: Discernment about an object may be impacted by the spatial abilities of the individual. For instance, the distance and the direction of that object may vary their physical appearance. Accordingly, the student may need to be dimensionally aware as well.
- Figuring out: It may be effortless for identifying something when it is only one in number. Nonetheless, when there are multiple objects, the process may turn arduous. While this strengthens the optical sagacity, some activities with cards ensure the same.
- The puzzle-related activity also focuses on sequencing and short-term memory betterment.
Activities and games for visual perception- Our choices for you
Comprehending the edges of activities for visual perception may entice you to look for some appropriate choices. Here we listed out ten choices crafter for you to consider:
1. Sort the belongings
You can tell your child to arrange toys, shapes, or anything else you have that you believe they could organize.
You can bring colorful beads or buttons, which are also enjoyable to sort because they come in various shapes. Put them in plastic tubs or boxes and let your kid sort through them. You can also give colorful chocolate gems, which are safe to consume, and tell them to sort their colors. An even example is organizing the child’s playroom. If the playroom needs to be cleaned, enlist your child’s help by asking them to put the toys in; they can be arranged by type, color, or size.
Separating and categorizing objects is an essential skill. It helps your young child observe similarities and dissimilarities, classify objects, and develop early learning and management skills.
2. Puzzle game
An excellent visual perception exercise for your kid is a puzzle game because it requires a mental picture of how the pieces should fit together. To find the correct parts and how they interlock, your child must know how the final image will look.
While initiating the task, the family or guide obtains a paperboard and draws an image on it. They now cut this into parts to do a puzzle out of it. These parts are now set up on the ground, and the child is instructed to sift through them. Afterward, the student may be required to put them together to build meaningful art. To ensure engagement, you should keep the complexity level to a minimum at first.
Parents can help by incorporating puzzles into their child’s regular playtime and ensuring that they are age-appropriate. Puzzles with fewer, larger pieces are best for small kids.
3. Make a guess
This game is the most fun, playful, and learning game. It is entertaining for children to learn and practice visual perceptual skills such as visual memory, attention, discrimination, figure-ground, and form constancy.
First, one of the family members makes a set of ten cards, each with a different shape and letter. Now, they shuffle these ten cards well to offer the learner a chance to choose a couple of cards. First, they may start with guessing what cards among those ten that child has chosen. For example, they may guess a card picked as a heart with the number 8, and other club 4. Later, the two cards are turned around and then the learner can make out the differences between these two in say around 5 points. This way, their visual perceptions are detected and also ensured in practice.
Because it is uncomplicated and effortless to execute, families with their kids can play it anywhere while sitting in a restaurant or traveling somewhere. It’s a skill-building game that your kid can also play during family game night.
4. Colorful Straw Box
First, take an unused cardboard box or any shoebox. Then take plain white paper, stick it onto the box and make small holes on the box so that straw can get inside it. Make at least six or seven small holes in one line, respectively. Afterward, use different colors to circle the hole area and ask your child to put the same color straw into it.
It is an excellent activity for exploring and matching colors. It encourages children to experiment with different colors, and threading the straws through the hole helps them develop fine motor skills while developing coordination skills.
5. Spot the picture
When identifying various shapes and letters becomes facile, mentors may increase the level of practicing by asking them to spot the shapes in complicated contexts.
To start with, the teacher procures a printed picture of scenery or any other picture. They may need to ensure that this image should have hidden shapes in it. Now, they distribute these prints one to each student and start the timer. The learner needs to take a pencil and mark the shapes. For instance, they may mark out squares, triangles, and letters too.
In this activity, buy a book with hidden pictures and ask your child to find the specific image. It is an excellent tool for assisting children in developing and strengthening visual perceptual skills such as visual attention, figure-ground, visual discrimination, visual memory, and form constancy. This game is fun to play and easy to learn.
6. Scrapbook
Buy a scrapbook or create a book with one page for each color. Now draw pictures on each page and allow your child to cut them out of shape. At the same time, your kid can also use a scrapbook to stick images of different colored objects. Tell them to cut the image from old books or materials and paste them onto the appropriate pages.
7. Perception with shapes
As we comprehend that visual perception works for both letters and shapes too, getting in an activity with enticing shapes can be a remarkable campaign. In this activity, the learners get a chance to observe and play with shapes.
To start with, the teacher draws a picture on the board. This may be a simple outline at inception. Now, students are called upon and are given a couple of minutes to observe various traits of that drawing. Later, the instructor erases it. They ask learners to retrace the same thing on their paper and may offer a time span of ten minutes. Later the arts of each pupil are checked and applicable feedback is given.
This activity often focuses on increasing the visual perception of the student by letting them practice remembering crucial traits of the picture to ensure them in their art. The instructor may make it drastically complicated as students begin to trace it better.
8. Dots connection
Take plain paper and a pen or pencil, and draw something with dotted lines. It should be big and clear so that kids can easily understand. Once it’s done, tell your child to match the dotted lines and find out what is drawn on the paper. It is one of the best activities for kids to help develop fine motor and visual perception skills.
Dot connection activity can assist your kid in developing fine motor skills by instructing them how to grab a pencil or a pen. As their writing skills enhance, they’ll figure out how hard they need to push on the paper. Your child’s concentration ability can also enhance as they discover to connect the dots in the correct order. When they complete this activity, they will feel great accomplishment.
9. Number circle
Draw a circle on the cardboard and divide it into as many portions as your child wishes to learn. Preferably less than ten numbers, as more sections will confuse your child and cause them to lose interest. Paint dotted circles to represent the numbers in each section of the pie. Write the numbers on a sticky note and have your child match the numbers to the dots before attaching the sticky note to the corresponding number of circles.
10. Play with playing cards
To start with, the mentor shows a random card or on a screen. Now, a deck of cards are shuffled and scattered on the table. Now, let your child pick up the same card. Scanning and spotting the required card from the entire deck requires a great deal of visual skill. You can set a time and have your child compete against siblings or friends. This may occasionally need mentor guidance. Nonetheless, it may also be considered as a regular card game to practice.
Card games improve agility and spatial awareness. Holding cards in their tiny hands enables children to develop these two crucial motor skills. Depending on the game’s complexity, it can also help develop skillfulness.
Playing card games with children stimulate a wide range of cognitive skills, including memorization, matching, number, pattern recognition, and promoting more complex math concepts, depending on the difficulty level. As difficulty increases, children use their intellect more to provide solutions and find new ways to win.
Conclusion
We hope you found the above-given suggestions helpful for improving your child’s visual perception. There are numerous games that your kids can play, and the tips given are intended to serve as a guideline that will hopefully inspire you to create your games.
Incorporate some of the above activities into your child’s day to promote visual perceptual development. It is also critical to offer assistance and encouragement to ensure a positive experience and anticipated outcomes. Furthermore, communicate with your child’s teacher to ensure that the strategies are implemented in the classroom to maximize learning success.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,