Visual Motor Skills
Visual motor skills or visual motor integration are the skills we use when we look at visual information and then respond with a motor action. For example, when we catch a ball, our eyes look at the ball and our hands and arms form a physical movement to reach out to catch the ball.
We use our visual motor skills not only to play sports but also in our academic work. Here are some examples of how visual motor skills are used at school:
- Reading: When a student reads, their eyes have to move from left to right smoothly, when they make a mistake, they need to be able to use their visual motor skills to return and focus on the particular word in the sentence that they may have misread
- Writing: When a student writes, they have to see what the word is and then match their hand movements in order to create an accurate letter or number.
- Copying and Converting: When a student copies off the board or from a book, they need to be able to look up at the board or down at the book, read what has to be copied and then use their fine motor to write or type the content accurately.
- Educational Worksheets: When a student completes a worksheet, they need to be able to focus on one section of the worksheet at a time. If there are 10 questions on the worksheet, they need to be able to use their visual motor skills to focus on a specific question at one time before moving on to the next question.
- Setting Up Workstation: When a student is required to set up their resources for a task, a student needs to use their visual motor skills to focus on a particular resource that they may need.
We can practice our visual motor skills through a variety of gross and fine motor skills as well as using worksheets that challenge visual motor processing and integration.
Gross Motor activities that support Visual Motor Skills & Integration:
- Ball skills – throwing, catching, kicking. Start with bigger balls that move slowly and as the student becomes more confident use smaller balls that move quicker and require fine motor responses
- Practice making large letters and numbers in the air. Use the whole arm and hand
- Play movement games that encourage stopping and starting, moving left and right. Homemade obstacle courses are good for this as the student needs to process what they are seeing in front of them and respond with an appropriate physical movement e.g. jump over the cup or crawl under the table
Fine Motor activities that support Visual Motor Skills & Integration
- Practice doing dot to dots, connecting lines to dots accurately
- Use colouring in books to promote fine motor accuracy (colouring within the lines)
- Play with lacing or beading activities. Begin just with practicing threading the beads and then move on to copying patterns e.g. green bead, yellow bead, red bead and continuing this pattern. You can even use different shaped pasta if you don’t have beads.
Here are some Visual Motor worksheets that you can access and use with your child
Pattern Recognition & Visual Integration
Construction Activity for Fine Motor and Visual Integration Skills
If you have a student/child that you notice has difficulty with mixing up similar looking letters when writing/reading e.g. (b/d , p/q, t/f) or is consistently writing some of their letters in reverse/backwards it could be due to a lack of understanding of direction e.g. left vs right. The below “Directionality & Visual Perception” activity is a good practice activity to practice “facing left” and “facing right” and can provide insight into how a child may visually perceive what this looks like to them.