Visual Motor Skills

Visual Motor Skills

We have shared quite a few posts relating to vision and visual perception!

Visual Perception Activity for Kids

is made up of many areas related to vision and the ability to perceive sight with relation to movement of the hands and body in functional tasks.  Visual perceptual skills in kids are necessary for so many things...from self-care to fine motor skills, to gross motor skills...all parts of a child's development require visual perception.  There are many pieces to the giant term of "visual perception".  

When it comes to vision, there is so much to learn!  Start by checking out Visual Motor Integration developmental milestones for age-appropriate skills that children typically master from age 0-5. 

Activities to help develop visual motor integration:

Hand-Eye Coordination Activity for Kids

Hand-eye coordination is using the information received through the vision system to coordinate the hands with control, in order to complete a task, such as handwriting or catching a ball.

Baby and Toddler Sensory Floor Play

Blue-Themed Sensory Play for Babies and Toddlers

Fine Motor Play with Tissue Paper

Baby Brain Building

Invitation to Scoop and Pour

Baby Ice and Bath

Playing With Color

Learning Apples and Red

Learning Colors Cup Play

Cups and Spoons
Sight word scooping
Finger dexterity exercise

Tracing Letters: Letter Formation Handwriting Practice with Chalk

Tracing Lines with a DIY Light Box

Pencil Control Worksheets You Can Make At Home

Christmas-Themed Pencil Control Activities-DIY Worksheets for Pencil Control

Line Awareness with Beads 

Scissor Skills: Activities for Kids

Improving Scissor Skills with Play Dough

Cutting Foam Beads

Using  Stickers to Help with Scissor Skills

Finger-painting Fireworks for Scissor Use

Icicle Winter Scissor Skills Activity

Bunny Tongs Scissor Skills Activity

Color Sorting Scissor Activity

Pattern activities

Eye-hand coordination activity with letters
I Spy sight word sensory bottle
Recycled milk container ghost catch game

DIY lacing cards from recycled carry out containers

Fine motor and auditory bubble wrap activity

Fine motor with pipe cleaners and a cardboard box

Cereal box fine motor coordination

Pipe cleaner bottle activity

Toddler ping pong activity
Play Dough noodle color mattch
Feather Beading

Fine Motor color sorting

Play Dough color match

Building shapes with styrofoam

Heart breaker nut activity
Giant motor planning maze

Visual scanning is essential for handwriting skills, puzzles, word searches, mazes, and many many functional tasks.  Scanning a room for a missing sock may be difficult if a child demonstrates difficulty with visual scanning.

Penguin math activity
Finger dexterity game with recycled bubble wrap
Sight word sensory bin with shredded paper
Cardboard box golf tee hammering
Letter learning with recycled bottle caps
Recycled bottle cap sight word stamps
Visual Scanning Activities
Sight word game
Giant motor planning maze

Visual motor sticker scanning activity
Create your own race track

 

Benefits of Stickers in Occupational Therapy

Visual Tracking with Cardboard Tubes

Visual Spatial Relations is organizing the body in relation to objects or spatial awareness.  This is an important part of handwriting.  Spacing pieces of a puzzle amongst the others and writing in relation to the lines is one way to work on this skill.

Concentric Circle Painting
Line Matching with pipe cleaners
Color matching Elemer Activity
Word building with nature
Line awareness heart maze
Finger dexterity exercise
Winter scissor activity-cut icicles
Pencil Control candy cane
Sight word match with string
Giant motor planning maze
Line awareness bead picture
Create your own race track
Letters on the garage door

Visual Discrimination is determining differences in color, form, size, shape. 

Penguin math activity

Color matching Elemer Activity

Finger dexterity exercise

Practice "b" and "d" with sensory writing

Color shape discrimination Sort

Coin discrimination

Real toy I Spy game

Letters on the garage door

Visual Closure is the ability to fill in parts of a form in the mind's eye to determine shape or a whole object.  

Color matching Elmer Activity

Create your own race track

Visual Figure Ground is the ability to locate objects within a cluttered area (think "I Spy").  Finding a red square among the pile of foam pieces is one fun way to work on this area of visual perception.