Lockdown Day 19 – EoS – Visual Discrimination
Most of what we learn, we take in through our senses. We will start today with the visual sense (eyes) and consider what is known as VISUAL DISCRIMINATION.
Visual discrimination is generally defined as having a set of visual skills that have the ability to detect specific features of an object in order to recognise, match, duplicate, and/or categorise it.
Visual discrimination skills can thus be described as the ability to determine differences and similarities between objects to help us to understand and interpret the environment around us. Visual discrimination activities like sorting by size, shape, and colour also help to strengthen a child’s observational skills.
These tasks provide opportunities for the brain to interpret and process visual information which lays a solid foundation of visual discrimination skills that are especially important later when learning reading, writing, and mathematics.
Here are a couple of activity ideas that you can use during the course of the day to help build your child’s visual discrimination skills:
SORTING OBJECTS BY SHAPE, SIZE OR COLOUR.
You will need to see what you have available in your homes for this. For example:
- Separating coloured pegs/lego/cars into their colours
- Sorting the cutlery back into their holders by shape (forks, knives, spoons)
- Sorting cutlery by size (teaspoons and tablespoons)
MATCHING OBJECTS
The sock drawer is a good example for this! Empty all the sock drawers into a basket and bring the socks (pairs and singles) to a workspace. Empty the basket and unroll all the socks. Now ask the child to look for the matching socks. Here the child will need to match the socks by size AND colour.
This is also a good opportunity to talk about the similarities and differences and to practice sock rolling or folding skills.
Any socks that remain without a partner can easily be turned into sock puppets to be used in story-telling!
GRADING OBJECTS
Grading and seriation are also an important aspect of visual discrimination and this can easily be practiced around the house.
- Take a couple of potatoes from the pantry and discuss that the potatoes are all potatoes, hence they are the same in that aspect. However, if we look closely, we can see that they are not all exactly the same size! See if you can grade them from the largest to the smallest. Remember to use correct comparative language here!
- Use the same approach in the garden: stones, leaves, pebbles, twigs…
- You can also grade leaves by colour! Autumn is approaching so some of our trees are are starting to lose their leaves. Grade leaves either from the biggest to the smallest, or in their shades of green!
- Ask the child to collect a number of blue objects, and then grade them from the lightest shade to blue to the darkest shade of blue.
ADDING SOME CRITICAL THINKING
Gather similar objects from around the house such as a green koki, a green apple, a green sock and a yellow banana. Ask the child to look carefully at the objects and decide which object does not belong. In this case the answer would be the banana, as it is the only object that is not green!
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