Travel Therapy!

It is the holiday season, which means... lots of road trips coming our way. When I was growing up, my family traveled at least five hours to see our relatives. I remember coloring, listening to my cassette player (oh yeah!), playing Yahtzee with my brother, and playing "I Spy". Nowadays, most of our kids are playing with electronics or watching TV.

Today's blog is called Travel Therapy for a reason! I am going to give you some great Vision Therapy exercises to do on the road (or airplane)! Your children with have no idea they are doing therapy!

 Travel Bag Goodies:

1. Hidden Pictures: This improves your child’s Figure Ground skills.
1. Search Google - Printable Hidden Pictures.
2. Or go to Amazon!
2. If you remember from this blog: Put a small sticker on the window nearest your child, and instruct him/her to look at the sticker for a few seconds, then to look outside at the farthest thing their eyes can find, and then back at the sticker again. Have your child do this at least 10 times every time they get in the car.  
3. Word Searches: Improves Visual Closure and Figure Ground skills. 

1.      Search Google - Printable Word Searches 

2.      Or go to Amazon!     

4. Color by number- Works on Visual Motor skills, Saccades, improves their                  number recognition skills as they identify and match each number with its corresponding color using a number. 
1. Search Google - Printable Color by Number
2.  Or go to Amazon!
5. Dot-to-Dot: Improves Visual Closure Skills and Visual Motor skills.

1.      Search Google - Printable Dot-to-Dot

2.      Or go to Amazon!

6.      Play "I Spy" with your children - Improves Figure Ground skills. 

7.      Mazes: Improves Pursuits, Figure Ground, Spatial Relations skills.

1.      Search Google- Printable Mazes

2.      Or go to Amazon! 

As you can see, there are many fun ways to do Vision Therapy on the road. These are all easy things to do with your children, and it doesn't cost a lot of money. Make the games fun and I promise these games are the way to go! You can do therapy wherever your holiday plans take you. 

VII: Visual Closure

We have come to the end of our seven-part Perceptual Skill blog series. This post focuses (a little Vision Therapy humor) on Visual Closure, which is the ability to visualize a complete whole when given incomplete information or a partial picture. 

Why is this important? It is the foundation skill for fluency and speed in reading and writing. This skill helps children read and comprehend quickly; their eyes don't have to individually process every letter in every word for them to quickly recognize the word by sight. This skill can also help children recognize inferences and predict outcomes that they experience through their daily lives. 

Children with poor visual closure may have difficulty completing a thought. They may also confuse similar objects or words, especially words with close beginning or endings.

These activities aim to help a child organize and integrate what they see to create a recognizable visual image:

  1. Jigsaws

  2. Dot to dot

  3. Coloring in

  4. Word searches

  5. Writing or drawing in sand or foam

  6. Incomplete sentences. Fill in the missing letters or words

  7. Matching complete and incomplete shapes

  8. Construction games

  9. Scrabble

10. Stencils

11. Model making

12. Building 3D models. E.g. K'nex

13. Partially covering a picture and asking the child to identify the whole.

There you have it! This was a great series to learn more about how we perceive things. I hope this was a great learning experience for you. I have a some great blog entries coming up for this upcoming holiday season. Looking forward to all that is to come!

Here is the complete series of Perceptual Skills:

I.Visual Discrimination

II. Visual Memory

III.Spatial Relations

IV. Form Constancy

V. Sequential Memory

VI. Figure Ground

Part VI: Figure Ground

Happy November! We are almost coming to the end of our series about the perceptual skills.

Today we are going to discuss Figure-Ground. This skill helps us learn to visually isolate one object from a group of objects. For example, has your child asked, "Mom, I can't find my shoes?!" Of course, those shoes are right under your child's nose. Besides inattention, it could be the result of your child having difficulty distinguishing the “figure” (shoes) from the background (the other shoes in the closet), the “background.” Note where this skill gets its name. Makes sense, right?

Let's break this down. First, perception is what goes on in our internal mental world: how we organize and give meaning to raw data which we receive from the outside world through our senses.

There are two types of Figure Ground perceptions (just like Sequential Memory):

· Auditory figure-ground perception: is the ability to hear the voice of one speaker over the   background noises (music, other conversations, road noises).

· Visual figure-ground perception: is an inborn tendency which allows us to distinguish objects from a background.

Can you image how it might affect your child if he has a figure-ground weakness? Some examples of a child having figure-ground weakness may find difficulties in:

· Keeping their place when reading and scanning from one word to the next.

· Finding a word in a dictionary.

· Copying from a book or board, because they are prone to losing their place or omitting sections of work.

· Understanding pictures because they struggle to differentiate the outlines from the background.  

· Paying attention because it is hard to focus on one object while ignoring or blocking out the background. 

Practical ideas to improve figure-ground perception:

· When reading, use a book marker below the sentence that is being read.

· Play “I spy” games.

· Carry out specific instructions that involve looking for and fetching specific things (find the red pencil in the box; look for a picture of a flower on this page; design a treasure hunt).

· Sort objects according to shape, size, color, thickness, etc.

· Identify objects in pictures with a lot of detail

· Use tracing paper to trace patterns or complete mazes, do dot-to-dot or spot-the-difference pictures.

· Write a sentence without spacing between the words. Help the child to find the words by placing the spaces correctly.

· Word searches

· Find words in a dictionary.

Next week, is our last perceptual skill: Visual Closure. Have a great weekend! If you are just joining us here is the link to the beginning of our take on Perceptual Skills, Part I.