Visual Skills
Visual Skills enable an individual to process information around them. The ability to observe, recognize, and use visual information about forms, shapes, figures, and objects makes up our visual motor abilities. Visual motor skills include a coordination of visual information that is perceived and processed with motor skills, including fine motor, gross motor, and sensory motor. Visual motor skills (and visual motor integration) are needed for coordinating the hands, legs, and the rest of the body’s movements with what the eyes perceive.
Visual motor integration is a complex skill set which encompasses many underlying skills such as visual perception, motor control, and eye-hand coordination. Simply stated, it refers to the ability to translate a visual image, or a visual plan, into an accurate motor action.
Visual motor skills are made up of several areas:
Visual Processing Skills- These skills include how the eyes move and collect information. These are visual skills that take in and use the information in order to process that input. Visual skills include visual tracking, convergence, saccades, visual fixation, and visual attention. A component of visual processing includes visual efficiency. This refers to the effective use of that visual information.
Visual Perceptual Skills- Visual perception is our ability to make sense of what we see. Visual perceptual skills are essential for everything from navigating our world to reading, writing, and manipulating items. Visual perception is made up of a complex combination of various skills. Visual perceptual skills include visual memory, visual closure, form constancy, visual spatial relations, visual discrimination, visual attention, visual sequential memory, and visual figure ground.
Eye-Hand Coordination- Using the visual input effectively and efficiently with the hands allows us to manipulate and manage objects and items. This coordinated motor skill requires fine motor skill development. These motor skills allow us to collect visual information and use it in a motor action. Eye-hand coordination requires fine motor dexterity, strength, shoulder stability, core stability, etc
Activities to work on visual attention skills include:
Mazes
Card games
Memory games
Ispy games + books
Puzzles
Connect Four game
Checkers
Guess Who game
Matching activities
Memory games
Sorting by color
Patterning beads in bracelet making
“What’s different” pictures
Sort coins
Word searches
