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Summer is the perfect time to work on the type of eye-hand coordination and visual-motor skills that will help children with their fine motor, gross motor, and academic skills. Here are a few ideas that will keep your kids engaged during the summer break with some fun visual motor activities.
Fun Summer Visual-Motor Activities for Children
Many of these activities can be set up with things you probably already have in your home.
Copy patterns/pictures using shapes, pegs, etc
Put models together
Dot-to-dots pages
Mazes
Hidden picture searches
Word searches
Put puzzles together
Cut grass with scissors
Cut flowers for a flower arrangement
Simulate cutting motions by transferring objects with bubble tongs
Cut straws into small pieces and slide them on a string to make a necklace
Cut play dough/putty/clay
Cut shapes out of foam
Cut pictures from magazines or cereal boxes
Put origami designs together (check out my ocean animal origami ideas here)
Keep reading to learn a little bit more about visual-motor skills and why they are important in child development.
What are visual motor skills?
In short, visual-motor skills are the ability to respond to visual sensory input with a motor response. You may also see it referred to as visual-motor integration. Visual-motor integration happens when your child is able to integrate both visual and motor movements together for effective responses and movement.
Visual-motor skills include visual perception and gross motor and fine motor skills working together.
You can read more about visual perception in my post here (there are 7 sub-categories of visual perception!)
What are visual motor skills important for?
Visual motor skills are important for many different types of activities that kids need to do throughout their day. Some of these include gross motor skills like kicking a ball, and fine motor skills like cutting with scissors, or handwriting.
How do you practice visual motor skills?
You can practice visual-motor skills at home in a variety of ways. The great thing is that all gross motor and fine motor activities also require visual-motor skills in order to do them.
You can still focus on visual-motor skills by doing a lot of scissors and cutting activities, kicking and catching a ball, or any of the activities I shared above!
If you feel like your child is struggling with visual-motor skills it’s important to first get their eyes checked by an optometrist or developmental optometrist to rule out any physical issues with the eyes and to see if they need glasses or not. You will also want to talk to their pediatrician or doctor and ask for an Occupational Therapy evaluation. Occupational therapists are specially trained to look at all areas of child development to help improve their ability to complete everyday activities that might be impacted by visual skills.
You May Also Like:
- Eye-Hand Coordination Activities for Children
- Free Typical Pre-Writing Line Development Handout
- The Importance of Fine Motor Skills with Academics
