Visual perception is the ability to understand and interpret what we see. Visual perception allows children to make sense of shapes, letters, spaces, and details in their environment. This skill is important for many everyday tasks like reading, writing, copying, recognizing patterns, and even understanding spatial relationships (like knowing where objects are in relation to each other). In occupational therapy, we work on visual perception by using engaging activities that involve sorting, matching, puzzles, and games that encourage children to practice recognizing differences, patterns, and spatial placement. Strengthening visual perception skills can help kids feel more confident and successful with activities at school, home, and in play.
Activities to Complete at Home:
- Hidden picture puzzles
- Matching games such as Blink, Perfection or Qwirkle
- Color by number/symbol
- I-spy
- Tangram puzzles
- Cutting or tracing
- Stacking toys
- Interlocking and knob puzzles
- Finding a specified object/toy/letter among a group of toys/objects/letters
- Memory games
- Shape sorters
- Sorting objects by color, shape, size etc.
- Identify objects in a bag by feeling them and matching them to a picture
- Spot the difference pictures. Have two almost identical pictures and identify the differences between the two.
- Identify objects’ relation to one another (i.e. in front, behind, on top, next to etc.
- Geo-boards
- Cover up majority of a letter or number and have the child guess which letter/number it is
- Word searches
- Bingo games of letters or pictures
- Sudoku puzzles