Does your child struggle with handwriting, reading, or catching a ball? Sometimes these everyday tasks are more about visual skills than you might think. Understanding how children see and process the world can explain why they succeed (or struggle) in school, sports, and play.
I am Sara Pereira. I’m an occupational therapist and co-owner of Sensational Development Occupational Therapy on Long Island, New York. I wanted to take a little bit of time today to talk about how visual perceptual skills could impact a child’s success in many areas such as academics, sports, and how they interact with their world.
Visual Skills Go Beyond Eyesight
When we get referrals for children, many times it’s for visual motor concerns. A lot of people are not familiar with the term visual motor skills. It simply means how the eyes and body work together to see, process, and make a coordinated movement—like copying from the board, writing, or catching a ball.
In order to have adequate visual motor skills, you need:
- Fine motor function
- Gross motor function
- Visual perception skills
Visual Perception Helps Kids Make Sense of What They See
Visual perception is key in how we perceive our world. It is a cognitive process, or a process that happens through the brain. We take images from our environment, and then our brain makes sense of them.
When we look at visual perception, we are looking at several subcategories of this skill:
Visual discrimination
The ability to tell what it is that you’re looking at. Can you discriminate what you’re seeing? Is it a circle or a square?
Spatial relations
The ability to understand how things relate to each other spatially in their environment. Can you tell that the circle is on top of the square, or that the diamond is underneath the rectangle? Can you find your textbook on top of the shelf, next to the globe, by following multi-step directions?
Visual memory
The ability to remember what you’ve seen. When children are learning to spell or copying sentences and they have to look up for every letter or every single word in a sentence, it’s going to become a very laborious task. We want to see them start to chunk letters together. It’s going to make things more fluid and run a little bit smoother.
Visual closure
The brain’s ability to see part of an image and finish it. If you see a piece of a toy sticking out on a messy bedroom floor, can you tell that it’s the ball you’ve been looking for? Can you spot a notebook that’s on the counter and has other school supplies over it?
Being able to recognize, “That’s my notebook, even though I can only see the corner of the spiral bound book,” is a skill that’s really important, especially in reading. Being able to look at a word, interpret it, and know what it is, rather than sounding out each individual letter, is important.
Figure ground
The ability to find pertinent information in a busy background. For example, being able to find something in a messy desk or in their bedroom when they haven’t cleaned up. It’s the skills of being able to find the specific toy or piece of clothing that you’ve asked them to get or that they’re looking for.
Poor Visual Skills Can Affect Learning, Attention, and Confidence
Our visual perceptual skills, when combined with motor skills, result in visual motor abilities. You might see children who are really experiencing some frustration around these kinds of visual tasks. No matter what you do, they do not seem to be able to find something; but the second you go look for it, you can find it instantly.
It’s easy to think that they’re just not looking. But for some children, if their visual perception skills are an area of weakness, they’re not going to be able to find what they’re looking for. They are going to become frustrated, and they are going to avoid tasks that require them to use those visual skills like reading or writing.
Occupational Therapists Help Children Build Visual Motor Skills
In therapy, we will oftentimes use games. There are so many visual perceptual games that can be fun and engaging for a child where they don’t even really know that they’re working on that area of weakness.
We’re not going to do homework, reading or writing. That is a source of frustration that they have to do that all day, every day in school. Instead, we’re going to use play. We’re going to use children’s natural occupations in order to facilitate those skills and help strengthen them so that kids become more confident in their own abilities.
Reach Out to Sensational Development for Expert Support
If you suspect your child has difficulty with visual motor skills, contact our occupational therapists at Sensational Development. We are experts in helping to assess all of these areas to try to figure out what is impacting the child’s function day to day.
And we are always available for a consult. We’re happy to talk to parents and teachers to help educate you on these areas so you know what to look for and how to address them.
