Boredom Busters that Help Visual Skills

Posted 6 years ago by Danielle Winstone

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Here are some great Christmas gift ideas that will not only keep the kids happy and entertained over the holidays, it will also have them developing great visual skills.

Most people assume that being able to see clearly is all that there is to vision. But vision is an incredibly complex process - so much so half of the brain’s energy is solely dedicated to processing the information from the eyes.

The brain uses a certain set of skills to help it make sense of what the eyes see. These skills are called visual information processing skills.

Most of us learn and develop these skills when we’re quite young, though experience with our environment as we learn and grow.

However, some children don’t properly develop these skills. This often leads to difficulties learning at school and working later in life.

These skills can also be suddenly lost from stroke, head trauma, concussion or whiplash.

The good news is that, because these skills are learnt, they can also be taught, practiced and mastered.

There are seven main visual processing skills. To learn more specifically about each of these skills, go to http://www.danielleross.co.nz/

 

Now, to the toys: 

  • At OCULA, we absolutely love Where’s Wally  - these books stimulate so many visual skills, it should be a must in every child’s library. Skills such as visual discrimination, visual figure ground and fine-tune visual search and scanning skills.

  • Take it outdoors! Playing Simon Says is a great game to develop visual sequential memory – the harder the instructions, the better!  Twister is great for visual-spatial skills and doing these outside is a great way to engage in the outdoors and reduce the chance of myopia.
  • Rainy day savers include dominoes, bingo and card games such as Uno, Snap and Blink all develop visual discrimination and memory and to develop pattern and form recognition. 
  • If visual memory needs work, Animal Mastermind Towers is fantastic, as it develops both visual memory and visual sequential memory.

  • Good games to work on form constancy include Boggle and Boggle Junior, Quiddler, Scrabble Junior and Bananagrams.

  • Scrabble Junior and Bananagrams, along with Blokus and Bop It work on visual sequential memory.

  • Junior Labyrinth is a great game for visual figure ground

  • Skills in visual closure can be worked on with Shape Ometry and

  • Pixy Cubes, the later also working on visual discrimination and memory.

 

Visual discrimination is one of the most fundamental visual skills. Games to develop this skill includes

  • Spot the difference

  • Rush Hour

  • SET and SET Cubed

  • Pix Mix

  • Qwinkle

  • Tricky Fingers

 

To develop both visual discrimination and visual memory, check out these games

  • Qbitz

  • Stare

  • Spot It

wheres wally

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