Early Learning: Visual Perceptual Skills – part 2

I am so excited to share this 6th video blog in our article on Early Learning with you! In it were are going to be looking at the Visual Perceptual Skills of Discrimination, Closure and Analysis & Synthesis.

Welcome to all our new followers as well. If you are new here, remember that all the aspects we have discussed up until now are interlinked. So be sure to catch up on the previous videos. I have included links to the previous videos at the bottom of this article.

Visual Discrimination:

Visual Discrimination is the ability to recognise visual detail. In essence, it is the visual perceptual skill that helps us to recognise when things are the same and when they are different. This is an important skill for reading because so many letters look similar. Think about letters like a/o, b/d, m/n, v/w. g/q for instance.

You can practice visual discrimination with you child through the following activities:

Have them play Bingo (the kind with pictures)
Fill two bowls with similar / different items and have them identify these
Fill various glasses with liquid and have them compare which glasses have the same amount of liquid as well as which have more / less.
Have them match socks while you are folding laundry
Get them to sort your small change
Draw stick figures and have them copy these with their bodies

Visual Closure:

This visual perceptual skill enables us to recognise a familiar item, even if we can only see part of it. Think of how often text gets cut off or smudged when we make photocopies or scan documents. Well developed visual closure skills are going to help your child make sense of the text if this happens.

Improve your child’s visual closure skills by:

Having them complete dot-to-dot pictures
Draw pictures and then fold the page in half. Ask your child to identify what you have drawn.
Play construction games

Visual Analysis and Synthesis:

You will probably remember that we chatted about Analysis and Synthesis when we discussed Auditory Perception. Analysis is about analysing detail, such as the letters in a word. While Synthesis is about seeing the whole. Like the word made by putting different letters together, for example. You will see instances of these in visual art, where artists have created a picture where each pixel is made up of individual photos.

You can further enhance your child’s visual analysis and synthesis skills by:

Cutting up the individual facial features of models in full-page magazine adverts and then having your child assemble them again.
Playing Tangream. We love the Tangram template and picture sets that www.onemammasdailydrama.com made available