Part III: Spatial Relations

For the last couple weeks we have been talking about Perceptual Skills. I hope you are enjoying them as much as I am. Today we are going to blog about Spatial Relations. I found a great website by Michelle Pratt, who is an Occupational Therapist.  I loved her website because she gave fun activities to improve each Perceptual Skill. Here is her take on Spatial Relations:

Visual Spatial Relations

Visual Spatial perception provides us with information about our environment. The way a child perceives space and their position or orientation within that space can affect their gross motor skills and classroom performance. It is the ability to distinguish differences among similar objects or forms. This skill helps children in understanding relationships and recognizing underlying concepts. This area is closely related to the problem solving and conceptual skills required for higher level science and math.  

Visual Spatial Orientation-- helps us with letter reversals. The most common cause of reversals in older children is a lack of visual spatial development--consistently knowing left from right, either in relationship to their own bodies or in the world around them. Children with poor visual processing have not developed adequate skills in visual perception and spatial orientation, such as laterality and directionality. 

Definition

Is the ability to understand and interpret relationships:

a. Between oneself and other people. E.g. Stand behind Mommy

b. Between oneself and other objects. E.g. put the chair beside Daddy

c. Objects in relation to other objects. E.g. put the brick in the box.

A child with visual spatial problems may have difficulty with:

1. Interpreting instructions. E.g. write your name at the top of the page.

2. Dressing. Putting garments on up side down or being unable to turn them the right way round.

3. Correctly positioning equipment, such as utensils at meal times.

4. Moving themselves in space. In PE games or when doing gymnastics or obstacle courses.

5. Tracking mazes.

6. Copying patterns or Lego models.

7. Producing 3D drawings E.g. Houses, boxes or cubes.

8. Setting out work on a page, particularly mathematical problems or diagrams.

9. Labeling diagrams.

Activities to help

Activities for yourself and one other person or a group1. Simon Says
2. Leapfrog
3. Crawl under someone's legs
4. Stand beside the tallest person
5. Cat and mouse games
6. Arrange people to make shapes
7. Obstacle courses
8. Hopscotch
9. Games with hoops, beanbags and boxes.
10. Setting a table
11. Board games e.g. Othello, chess, etc.
12 Craft activities e.g. collage, origami
13. Construction games e.g. Lego, building a railway track or fort.

Copying Activities

Activities requiring copying 3D to 3D

1. Construction toys e.g. Lego
2. Multi link
3. Peg patterns

4. Patterns with objects using different shapes, sizes and colors.

Activities requiring copying 2D to 3D

In these the child makes the model from copying a card, picture or photograph.

1. Block or peg patterns
2. Model making from pictorial instructions e.g. Lego, K'nex
3. Following a recipe when cooking
4. Origami, copying diagrams in a book.

Activities requiring copying 2D to 2D

1. Copying a picture

2. Copying from the whiteboard

3. Constructing a drawing.

The above activities are great in more ways than one. We all know I love hands on activities more than electronics! Give some of these activities a try and next week we will talk about Form Constancy! Have a great weekend!

Perceptual Skills, Part II: Visual Memory

Today we'll continue our series on Perceptual Skills and discuss Visual Memory. Previously, we have touched on the importance of visualization. We talked about how it can affect different subjects in school. Let's do an updated review on Visual Memory.

So what is Visual Memory? Visual Memory helps us recall what we've seen. Obtaining maximum visual information in the shortest possible time provides for optimal academic and athletic performance. The ability to retain this information over an adequate period of time is essential for proficiency in reading comprehension and spelling.

The Visual Memory sub-test on the Perceptual Motor Evaluation (PME) measures the ability to remember a single form. If there are dysfunctions in visual memory, it may cause students to have difficulty recognizing the same word on the next page and reduce reading comprehension. It will also result in prolonged time copying assignments and difficulties transferring information from one place to another. 

Does your child have challenges with remembering a word they just read? If so, there is a solution! Through Vision Therapy we can develop good Visual Memory skills. Stay tuned next time because we will review Spatial Relations!

Perceptual Skills, Part I

Last week Dr. Durocher and I were chatting about perceptual skills and what each meant. Before starting Vision Therapy, we evaluate every child through a Perceptual Motor Evaluation (PME). It is about 1.5 hours of testing and we examine each perceptual skill. Each of the seven sets can cause an array of problems so over the next couple of weeks we will go into details about the seven perceptual skills.

Here are the seven perceptual skills:

• Visual Discrimination
• Visual Memory
• Spatial Relations
• Form Constancy
• Sequential Memory
• Figure Ground
• Visual Closure

In today's blog, let's discuss visual discrimination.

Visual discrimination lets us see differences between objects that are similar. For example, when we read, it's visual discrimination that let's us see that the words "was" and "saw" are different, even though they have the same letters.

There are many different stages to visual discrimination:

1. Difficulty with vowels in words; ex. went and want, ride or rode, horse and house, confused and confessed.
2. Difficulty with consonants in words; ex. then and when, would and could, ever and even, and presents and prevents.
3. Reversals are displayed; ex. was and saw, big and dig, spot and stop, conserve and conversed.
4. But the most common problem for our students is they do not focus on individual letters of a word; ex. when as then, then as when. They often skip over the initial letter sound.

Does your child confuse similar words? If so, there is a solution! Through Vision Therapy we can develop good visual discrimination skills. We can teach students to establish consistent left-right eye movements and how to focus on the differences in similar words. Stay tuned next time because we will review Visual Memory!