If your child receives help for visual tracking and perception skills, this post may give you some ideas of things to do at home to keep building those visual skills!
Convergence and Divergence
Convergence and Divergence
This is work for the eye's small muscles to pull them together and apart in sync to see things close and far away. It has nothing to do with the need for glasses (visual acuity).
An activity to can do is having a child alternate reading from up close to far away. This is great for building that working memory and making a child scan, converge the eyes up close and diverge the eyes to see something farther away. In the picture above, the student is reading on picture on the paper and then one from the board (jumping eyes from board to paper after reading the picture or letter). You could make a grid of pictures, letters, numbers, etc and have them do this at home standing with the same page taped to the fridge or wall. Make the pictures larger to make it easier and make them smaller to make it harder.
Eye Jumps Across Page
An activity to can do is having a child alternate reading from up close to far away. This is great for building that working memory and making a child scan, converge the eyes up close and diverge the eyes to see something farther away. In the picture above, the student is reading on picture on the paper and then one from the board (jumping eyes from board to paper after reading the picture or letter). You could make a grid of pictures, letters, numbers, etc and have them do this at home standing with the same page taped to the fridge or wall. Make the pictures larger to make it easier and make them smaller to make it harder.
Eye Jumps Across Page
You can use that same chart of letters, numbers or pictures in this activity. Simply have the child read the first letter in the row and the last one. Then they jump down to the next row and do that again. This has the small muscles of their eyes work to read, skip the middle letters and read the last letter again. It works on tracking and the eyes working together that are needed for reading, writing and copying information from board or book to their paper.
Visual tracking
http://eyecanlearn.com/tracking/pursuits/
Check out this great list of activities to work on tracking skills! The flashlight tag and marble games are really fun. You can also have your child try the video exercises listed on this site too.
Visual Perception
http://eyecanlearn.com/perception/
Check out the explanations for visual perception skills (as there are many aspects to what we visually perceive when we are looking at things).
Activities at home to build these skills are working on right/left direction and sides of the body, positional awareness games (on top, under, beside, behind, between, etc), puzzles, pattern building, hidden pictures, Ispy, finish the picture and playing the memory card game to recall location of matches.
This site has exercises for each skill! If your child has trouble with reversals, these exercises are great!
Here is the homepage link as well.
http://eyecanlearn.com/
If you have any questions or need resources/ideas, contact your OT via email by clicking the button below and locating your students OT. If you do not know who the OT is, send a contact to any of the OT staff and we will get your questions to the right person!
Visual tracking
http://eyecanlearn.com/tracking/pursuits/
Check out this great list of activities to work on tracking skills! The flashlight tag and marble games are really fun. You can also have your child try the video exercises listed on this site too.
Visual Perception
http://eyecanlearn.com/perception/
Check out the explanations for visual perception skills (as there are many aspects to what we visually perceive when we are looking at things).
Activities at home to build these skills are working on right/left direction and sides of the body, positional awareness games (on top, under, beside, behind, between, etc), puzzles, pattern building, hidden pictures, Ispy, finish the picture and playing the memory card game to recall location of matches.
This site has exercises for each skill! If your child has trouble with reversals, these exercises are great!
Here is the homepage link as well.
http://eyecanlearn.com/
If you have any questions or need resources/ideas, contact your OT via email by clicking the button below and locating your students OT. If you do not know who the OT is, send a contact to any of the OT staff and we will get your questions to the right person!