Improve Learning with Visual Perception Games

Playing Visual Perception Games is a great way to help your child prepare for school. It is also an excellent motivational method to improve learning & motor planning skills of children having trouble remembering or writing alphabet or numerical symbols and the like.

Here is a great list of learning activities you could start with and adapt to cater for your child as needed.
Pick The Difference

Print a simple picture of a person (or photocopy a drawing) 5 times. On each picture change something slightly, eg add detail like earrings or moustache, different coloured eyes etc. Give your child two pictures to look at and ask them to identify what is different in one of them. Swap the 5 pictures to play it over & over.

Follow The Leader
A great way to extend a child’s concentration and memory of sequencing events. At it’s simplest take it in turns to copy each other’s actions, eg clap hands 3 times, tap your head, crawl under the table. Make it more difficult by extending the number of actions that need to be copied. Turn it into a simple comprehension listening game by playing ‘Simon Says’.

Button or Coin Sorting
Collect the loose change or spare buttons off clothing and store them in a jar. Get your child to sort the buttons by colour or size. Or the coins into piles of the same value. Extensions of this visual concentration game would be to talk about which piles are the largest or smallest. Which piles have the most or least. Exposing your child to this mathematical language will aide them to learn the concept of number values and patterns later used to do addition and subtraction.

I Spy
Using a collection of picture cards play the old favourite game ‘I Spy with my little eye, something that is blue’. You can vary this depending on the child’s development concepts such as ‘something that is square, something that you eat, and of cause something that starts with ‘b’ and so on. This is a suggested game to help children learn any vocabulary and can be played with any of the downloadable images in our literacy resources.

Mystery Bag
Using a pillow case and a collection of a few items. Display the items in front of your child (the more the harder the game). Have them close their eyes or turn away while you take one item and place it in the pillow case. Then have your child try to guess which item is missing. If your child has low verbal language skills this activity can be supported by having a selection of photos of the items that they can choose from.

Snap, Match or Memory Card Games
These games are not only great for visual memory but also good for increasing a child’s concentration time on one specific activity. Using a limited number of images that are identical to ‘snap’ or ‘match’ is always best. Increase the number of cards to increase the time and difficulty of the game. You can also increase the difficulty of concept development by asking children to match letter sounds with pictures or numerals with quantities. We have memory games for both the alphabet and numbers 1-20 to download to assist your child’s pre-development of literacy and numeracy in a fun way.

Often we play games as a ‘downtime’ activity, but as you can see you can easily improve learning with visual perception games such as these. If you have anymore we would love you to share them with us in the comments box below – or perhaps you have a few to share and would like to contribute an article.

One Response to Improve Learning with Visual Perception Games

  1. Yes, vision has a LOT to do with learning. Your readers might be interested in reading: http://learningmanagement.ca/assessing-visual-impediments-to-learning/. I observed a girl, Sam, in a video who was clearly struggling with visual developmental issues, but was classified as learning/reading disabled. Her mother said Sam had never had her vision assessed. From my observations, she was very highly farsighted and, as expected, this had not only had a major influence on her development of reading/learning, but also her personality. Dr. Charles Boulet

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