Saturday, January 7, 2012

Visual Perceptual Activity


Visual perceptual activities are a wonderful way for your child to have fun while working on an important skill.  Visual perceptual skills allow a person to understand what he or she sees. Visual perceptual skills include recognizing and identifying shapes, objects, colors, and other qualities. A person with functional visual perception is able to make accurate judgments regarding the size, configuration, and spatial relationships of objects.

Visual Spatial processing falls under the umbrella of visual perception and is the ability understand directional concepts for organizing visual space. It is the ability to perceive the position of two or more objects as they relate to each other and as they relate to your own body. For example, if you are walking through a room, you must know where you are positioned in relation to the walls, floor, other people, and furniture in that room. If you have visual spatial problems, you may have challenges with maneuvering through space, with ball skills, and with writing and spacing between words and letters.

Recent research reveals that the spatial language that parents use around their children causes the children to better attend to spatial information. For example, toddlers who frequently heard words such as "over, under, beside, tall, round, and short" from their parents scored better on spatial tasks at an older age! Additional research tells us that skills practice can improve spatial abilities. Since spatial processing is related to success in science, technology and math, as parents, we might as well expose our children to spatial language and activities.

In recently discovered the game Equilibrio that I have been using in therapy and I absolutely LOVE it. It is great for working on visual perceptual skills and it also requires dexterity, planning, patience, and persistence! These are all important skills to address, and believe me, the kids always have a blast playing Equilibrio! Check it out, it is available on Amazon.

Browse my blog for more occupational therapy activities!

Dear Readers, If you have found my blog to be helpful, please "like" my Facebook page and follow my blog...I'm trying to get my book published and this would be a great help! Thanks :) 

No comments:

Post a Comment