Perfect Holiday Gifts to Help Your Child Succeed in School

Children are always exploring and learning, both in and outside the classroom, so the holiday season is the perfect time to give them gifts that are fun and help them learn and excel.

Here are the kinds of toys and games that promote children’s visual skills.

Building Toys

Building toys fuel the imagination and develop spatial awareness and spatial organization skills. These skills are useful in understanding maps, geography and geometry, and solving math problems. Spatial awareness is also essential for sports and dancing.

When children build with toys, they also develop hand-eye coordination, problem-solving skills and the ability to [visualize].

Popular building toys include Legos, Lincoln Logs, Duplos, Mega Bloks, Magnatiles and Clics.

Games for Visual Processing

Children develop visual processing and reasoning by playing checkers, chess, dominoes and Rush Hour.

Memory games, which require players to identify pairs from remembered pictures, as well as puzzles, develop cognitive and visual skills. Puzzles and games strengthen visual skills [utilized] in geometry, math problems and reading comprehension.

Visual processing skills are essential not only in school but in life. They help us navigate using written directions, detect visual patterns, gather clues from the world around us and notice essential details.

Spatial Awareness Games

Spatial awareness is the process by which people become aware of themselves and other objects in the space around them. This is important for developing peripheral vision and a range of visual skills. Playing “ball” sports such as baseball, soccer, tennis, basketball and ping pong develops space perception and hand-eye coordination. These games require a fast reaction and an exact perception of the location of any object around you and how far or close the object is.

In addition to sports, marbles and pick-up sticks also encourage three-dimensional depth perception, which can also improve visual skills such as eye-tracking, eye muscle coordination and focusing.

A Child’s Vision Is Vital for Fun and Learning

Vision involves more than just seeing clearly. It gives children the confidence to join in games and participate in school. Often what appears to be a lack of interest in studies or behavior difficulties can be caused by underdeveloped visual skills.

School vision screenings are rudimentary and aren’t designed to assess a child’s visual skills.  Even a child with 20/20 vision can have visual skills deficits.

If you suspect your child is struggling in school, bring them to Pupila Family Eye & Ear Care for a functional vision evaluation.

If an issue with visual functioning is detected, your eye doctor can map out a personalized therapeutic program that will suit your child’s needs. Research supports vision therapy as an effective treatment for a wide range of functional vision problems. Vision therapy is like a gym that trains the brain and the eyes to work together and improve eye-brain-body coordination.

For more information or to schedule a functional vision evaluation, call Pupila Family Eye & Ear Care today.

Eye Therapy Vision Rehabilitation Center serves patients in Houston, Bunkerhill Village, Bellaire, Sugarland, Texas and surrounding communities.

REFERENCES

• https://www.thevisiontherapycenter.com/discovering-vision-therapy/optometrist-approved-gift-list