How to Teach Visual Discrimination Skills to Young Kids?

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Is your kid dyslexic? Is your student having issues with learning sight vocabulary? Is your toddler unable to discriminate between different letters and shapes? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, it means your kid must be suffering from visual discrimination issues. So, you should focus on teaching visual discrimination skills to your kids.

Importance of Visual Discrimination Skills in Young Kids

Visual discrimination skill is the ability to differentiate between different shapes and colors of your letters, symbols and words. It should be taught in early childhood when kids start identifying and observing different written symbols. So that they can build pre-reading skills in preschool. Moreover, this skill helps them identify colors and symbols in math and while writing. 

Dyslexic kids or other kids having learning problems may suffer from visual discrimination issues. They may not be able to read fluently because they are unable to discriminate between words and letters. Moreover, they will find it difficult to recall sight vocabulary and other symbols they have learnt. This will impact their academic skills too. Venter, an educational researcher, says that these kids also have poor handwriting issues.

Different researchers have explained the process of visual discrimination. They explain that when a kid sees an object, they recognize it and determine its real place in their cognitive operations. Visual discrimination is the information that is coming from the environment. So it means that we need to focus on cognitive abilities or hand-and-brain coordination to develop visual discrimination skills in the youngsters. 

There are various aspects of this skill. One is a visual motor skill that develops hand-eye coordination and spelling words. The other is form constancy, which is the ability to discriminate between words and letters. The third is visual memory which involves recalling what you have learnt. The fourth is visual tracking which involves tracking the text for reading and moving one’s eyes to scan the environment. The fifth is visual figure ground which is the ability to recognize and pick the accurate object from the busy ground. Visual language association is associating words with the accurate object and language classification is classifying objects by categories.

Researchers have found that this problem can be treated easily if we focus on it. In this case, you need to teach them various visual discrimination aspects. For this, you need an assistant too. Luckily, there is an app by Learning Odyssey that can help your kid with visual discrimination skills.

Peek and Seek App for Visual Discrimination Skills

Peek and Seek is an iOS app that is specifically designed for young kids and special needs education learners to develop visual discrimination skills. It contains a suite of activities that promotes fundamental visual skills such as closure, visual ground, form constancy and visual motor skills. 

For this, it has focused on graphic designs that are carefully created and selected for the tasks. These designs fall into different categories such as robots, bugs, butterfly wings, footwear and animals. They are identical to each other but can be discriminated against after careful observation. This aspect makes the challenge real for kids. Moreover, the selection of colors ensures that kids with limited color perception can carry out the task. Its carefully chosen palette is accessible to children with various color perception issues.

How Peek and Seek Work?

You need to download the app on your iOS mobile or any device. When you open it, you can find eight different categories of activities in this app, each focusing on a specific aspect of visual discrimination. Your kid needs to click on any activity they want to start. The app will share all the instructions with them in the spoken form. So, your kid doesn't need any reading skills to play these activities.

When your kid will understand what to do, the game will start. It has no time limit, scoring and pressure in completing the game. There are also no lives to lose in the game so you can be tension-free. The only thing that will happen in the game is that if your kid fails to complete one task, the game will not proceed. 

The game may have specific questions or activities. So, adults can sit with kids to guide and supervise them. Some questions in the game require thinking so adults can help in organizing the thought patterns of their kids. At the end of the game, users will get feedback from the app.

After completing one aspect, your kid can come to the main menu. There, they can go to any new tab for a new activity or can repeat the previous one for better learning. 

Key Features of Peek and Seek

Visual Discrimination Skills: Peek and Seek solely focuses on developing visual discrimination skills in kids. It is doing a pretty good job in it as all the aspects of the skill are covered in its activities.

App for Young Kids: It is an app for young kids, aged above 4. 

Compatibility: It is compatible with iPad IOS 8.0 or later. And, if you are using a Mac, it requires macOS 11.0 or later and a Mac with an Apple M1 chip or later.

Feedback and Defined Goals: Its pressure-free games provide feedback to users in the end. This feedback and defined learning goals in the spoken form ensure that kids can work on this app independently.

Skills Development: It is not a gamification-based game app but it focuses on developing skills in kids. It develops cognitive skills and visual discrimination skills in young children that can help them throughout their lives.

Alternatives of Peek and Seek

There are various other educational apps that you can use to teach various skills to your kid. Some famous alternatives are:

Letter Cross Tracking

Letter Cross Tracking is an iPad app that focuses on developing visual discrimination skills in the kid. Its games focus on hand-eye movement, visual tracking skills and spatial movement skills. In it, the kids have to scan the rows from top to bottom or left to right. This app contains gamification aspects with monsters and cute sound effects. 

Match it Up

Match it Up is another iPad game for kids above age 1.5. This game teaches cognitive and visual discrimination skills to toddlers. They do it by giving eight images on the screen. One is the central image and seven are surrounding it. The user has to match the central image with the identical one. This develops hand-to-eye coordination too.

Dexteria

Dexteria is another educational app that is compatible with Apple. It is for kids above age 5 and focuses on developing visual motor skills in users. There are different hand and finger exercises in the app that improve handwriting, control and dexterity. It also helps with fine motor precision.

Conclusion 

In short, visual discrimination is a crucial skill that toddlers and young kids should develop in their early childhood. For this, various websites and apps can assist parents and teachers in teaching these skills to kids. The prominent one among them is Peek and Seek. Where other apps are focusing on gaming aspects, it is focused on developing skills. That's why it is the best learning and teaching app for special kids. So, if any of your kids need it, you should utilize it.

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