Jigsaw Puzzles Develop Visual Perceptual Skills

Children who hate doing simple jigsaw puzzles should be encouraged to do a simpler similar task so that their visual perceptual skills will improve. What visual skills are involved in doing a jigsaw puzzle?

1. Visual spatial relations is the ability to recognize patterns between the puzzle pieces. In a jigsaw puzzle you must recognize that some pieces have a straight edge, for example. Thus, they produce the outer frame of the puzzle. 
2. Visual closure is the ability to predict what an image will look like when you only see a portion of it. To solve a jigsaw puzzle you have to be able to visualize which pieces fit into openings made by the other pieces.
3. Scanning the array of unused pieces is an eye movement skill. People with saccadic deficits will have difficulty finding the right jigsaw piece.
4. Visual memory is the skill that allows a person to create a mental image and then refer to it. This skill must be in place when searching for pieces and when returning to the incomplete puzzle to place the selected piece.
5. Visual attention is a basic skill that must be in place before the simplest puzzle can be completed. People who do not value the information received by their eyes will not do well at jigsaw puzzles. They tend to try to locate things by touch instead of by sight.
6. The ability to transition between a central fixation with peripheral vision is necessary to complete any jigsaw puzzle. This skill is often very under-developed in individuals on the Autism Spectrum

Each of these visual skills must be developed and in place in order to enjoy and be successful at doing jigsaw puzzles. Academic success also depends on each of these visual skills. So, if your children do not like doing jigsaw puzzles, do not allow them to avoid them. Try using simple preschool puzzles and time how long it takes to complete them. Challenge your child to beat their previous time. Go to a teachers' supply store and purchase parquetry blocks or tangram workbooks. Even inexpensive dot-to-dot books will help to develop a child's visual closure and scanning skills while the hidden picture puzzles in Highlights or the I Spy book series will also improve a child's puzzle solving skills. 

Remember to schedule an annual eye exam with an eye doctor who incorporates vision therapy into their practice. These developmental optometrists routinely examine children's visual perceptual development and can prescribe in-office vision therapy activities to help.

In addition, the Eye Can Too! Read series of e-books contains helpful home-based activities and resources that you can easily adapt for any individual child or classroom.

What's So Good About Recess?

Recess, that endangered but kid's favorite part of the school day, could be key to a child's academic success. No, not because they need a break - but they do! And, not because it's fun - but it is! Recess is where the gross motor bilateral coordination building laterality & directionality eye movement visual perceptual and visual motor integration skills all get exercised on a daily basis without anyone realizing it. That's the problem. So many educators insist that the reason children are not making more consistent progress learning to read and write is because they don't spend enough time in the classroom that many (especially inner city) schools are doing away with recess. My next Eye Can Too! Read book will be about recess games that actually will make it easier for children to learn to read. These include hopscotch, jump rope, ball games, aiming/tossing games, running games, and clapping games. I'm going to provide the directions and then explain the learning-related visual skills involved as well as connect those to how they are critical to developing adequate reading and math skills. Want to help? Add a comment here or on FaceBook or Twitter about your favorite recess game when you were a kid. If there was a type of recess game that you just never were able to do well, let us know that also. And, more than anything, make sure that the children you know, love, and work with have plenty of opportunity to be outside playing the games that build the skills they need in the classroom.

For Teachers About Learning & Vision

Teachers should be the first line of intervention when one of their students has a learning-related vision problem since they get to see the children at work every day. When a student covers one eye or puts their head down so that only one eye points towards the text or paper, the teacher should recognize that this child needs to see an eye doctor to rule out amblyopia, or problems teaming the eyes to keep a word or other image single. When a student squints or complains of having a headache often during school - especially when asked to copy work from the board or smart-board to a piece of paper on their desk, the teacher should suggest that the student's parent make an eye appointment to make sure that the child knows how to accommodate i.e. switch their focus from near to far and back again efficiently. When a student cannot line up the digits in a math problem or appropriately space words on their paper, the teacher should first offer some practical hints but if these do not seem to help, it is time for a referral to an eye doctor to make sure that the child's eye movements and visual perceptual skills are developing on schedule. When a student makes frequent reversals when reading or writing - especially after the second grade, this may be a visual spatial delay in the skills of laterality and directionality. Finally, when a student has trouble in PE or on the playground catching or aiming balls or, in general, has under-performing gross motor skills, the root of the problem could the visual-motor-integration. While each of these symptoms can make success in school very difficult, all of them can be addressed by a few weeks or months of in-office vision therapy under the supervision of a developmental optometrist. No child should be left behind in school because of addressable learning-related vision problems.

Strategies to Develop Visual Memory Skills

Today, after eight weeks of seeing me for in-office vision therapy, the optometrist discharged a high school sophomore patient previously diagnosed with a delay in the development of the perceptual skill called visual memory. She attends an elite parochial school with high standards and hard tests. Because it has been so difficult for her to remember what she studies, she has struggled with both her grades and her self image. Last week I introduced tangram puzzles as a way to help her discover meaningful strategies to remember complex material. This week she reported that it was the most significant activity of all the ones we did in therapy because it helped her approach her homework differently. Instead of becoming overwhelmed at the many individual words or concepts she had to remember, she began looking for and sorting the work into chunks and patterns that made sense. Even remembering the verb conjugations in her Spanish 2 class became so much easier.

Here is the sequence we came up with to remember a block design so that, without looking at the model, it is easy to rebuild it from memory:

• Start with a simple block design that you want to remember

• Build it 

• Analyze it by making associations and by dividing the larger design into manageable chunks

• See if you can close your eyes and see the design in your mind
  

• Practice referring to the mental image and drawing or assembling it on paper or in space

• Do something else for a while

• After several minutes, hours, or days, see if you can still access, refer to, build, and use the visual image stored in your mind

Shameless self-promotion: For home-schoolers (and vision therapy patients who need home therapy activities), I created the Green Book of the Eye Can Too! Read e-book series. All the activities require the use of visual perceptual skills to accomplish academic activities - I indicate the expected grade level for each activity as well as tips for parents to observe while their children attempt the tasks.

Oddly spaced handwriting could indicate a visual perceptual developmental delay

When a student has a delay in the developmental visual perceptual skill of visual figure ground, they may not be able to space the letters within words adequately. First graders whose letters vary widely in size may not be aware of how their work differs from the model because of delays in the development of their visual processing skills. Students who put extra wide gaps between letters within words or between words within a line may also be attempting to cope with an underdeveloped set of visual perceptual skills.

Vision is much more than the ability to see clearly at near and in the distance. It involves gathering visual information, intake skills; interpreting visual information, processing skills; and responding to visual information, visual motor integration skills.

The root of a student's difficulty, frustration, dislike of, and inaccuracy with reading or writing could be their visual skills. In fact, even when a student passes a vision screening, they could still have undetected learning-related visual challenges.

If they do not have independent, automatic, voluntary control of their eye muscles, they will have difficulty with gathering visual information. This aspect of vision can also be impacted by poor eye teaming skills.

If they do not have effective strategies for processing the visual information that the eyes send to the retina, they will have difficulty recognizing, remembering, or manipulating it.

If either the visual intake skills or the visual processing skills are under-developed, they will have difficulty with the motor response such as writing a word neatly, or finding the beginning of the next line, or hitting a baseball.

Teachers and parents are the first line of intervention when a student has a learning-related visual issue. If you notice that a student has a consistent problem with a certain type of assignment, ask the student what they think is going on before you tell them how to fix it. Then make sure to arrange a comprehensive vision examination with a developmental optometrist who is experienced with children and binocular vision. The doctor will be able to recommend an assortment of options for how to address any learning-related visual diagnosis with glasses, in-office vision therapy, or by suggesting activities for you to do with the student at home or in the classroom.

When otherwise healthy, intelligent, articulate, and curious children experience difficulty in academics, suspect that the problem has a visual root. At least, rule out any learning-related visual problem by taking them to a developmental optometrist for a thorough check-up.

All 3 Eye Can Too! Read books are available as of this week

Just in time for the St. Louis Home School Expo this weekend, the Green Book of the Eye Can Too! Read book series by Lesley Barker, became available from the publisher. This book provides a set of academic activities for home schoolers (and others) which also gives students practice using their visual perceptual skills. There are several different visual perceptual skills that are important to efficient learning: visual discrimination, visual memory, visual form constancy, visual figure ground, visual spatial relations, visual sequential memory, and visual closure. The book introduces you to each skill, how it is used to process visual information, and how to promote your student's visual perceptual development. There are standardized tests that can assess an individuals visual perceptual development given by developmental optometrists, educational psychologists, and neurologists. Even without a diagnosed visual perceptual developmental delay, this book will give parents and educators a tool to use to identify and improve areas where a student may be struggling. Besides, everyone's visual perceptual skills can improve with the experiences in this book. The three Eye Can Too! Read books are available in their prefered format: a PDF download, or as a printed text from the publisher, Home School Incorporated. You are welcome to browse the sample pages at the publisher's website or, if you are in St. Louis, visit the Center For Vision & Learning booth at the Home School Expo tomorrow between 9-5 at the First Evangelical Free Church on Carmen Road in Manchester. We'll also be doing a workshop at 10:30 and a clinic at 3.