Visual Stimulation

Visual Stimulation

How to teach your child to see better

Infant visual stimulation help children see better. The more vision is used, the greater the likelihood of better visual functioning. The driving thrust of visual stimulation is to help the child develop all of his physical and emotional abilities.

From birth, children use visual skills to progressively conquer their environment. The eye gives them the necessary information about the size, shapes and colors of the objects and people around them and the movements they perform. The visual stimuli they receive invite them to explore space, to move the toy and to smile at their mother as she approaches.

Good vision also helps them improve their eye-hand coordination by picking up objects within their reach or by looking at them. His first steps are facilitated by the vision, and the conquest of space and the exit to the unfamiliar environment demand a visual capacity running at full capacity.

Early visual stimulation in infants

The child with visual difficulties should learn all this as well, but he needs guidance in the way of this learning. With an early stimulation of the visual learning processes this goal can be achieved and avoided that this visual deficiency can lead to alterations in his/her personality because the visual disability is also multifunctional. With the early stimulation of visual-motor skills the ability to think and with it the opportunity to deal with people also varies. This facilitates social behavior and the ability to assert oneself in a group.

The evolutionary visual acuity of infants

The development of visual acuity is necessary for the evolution of the accommodation. Visual acuity improves by three months and approaches the adult's own values ​​at six months. When two years later, the child uses his vision in increasingly complex tasks, it is usually discovered that there is a problem.

Learning to see better in childhood

Visual stimulation is a technique that requires the preparation of an individualized program of activities that follows a sequence of visual experiences aimed at seeking an improvement in visual functioning. 

How to stimulate the child's vision

The more vision is used, the greater and better visual functioning. Therefore, visual stimulation will be more likely to succeed, if you take these recommendations into account:

- Short age. The smaller the child, the greater the likelihood of rapid progress in the use of vision.

- Motivation. Girls and boys need to be encouraged to use their vision in all tasks and activities so that they can progress.

- Keep in touch. Teach the low vision child to work by keeping eye contact with objects and especially with people.

- Explore. Stimulate outdoor exploration in the playground or in physical education classes allowing normal falls caused by the mis-calculation of distances. Overprotection should be avoided.

- Promote reading. Even when you read very slowly, moving your head or book instead of your eyes. If you get tired and skip lines or lose the thread you can switch from task to one less visually demanding.

- Contrasts. White paper and black ink provide the highest visibility and contrast.

- Glasses and magnifying glasses. They favor the use of a person's vision, but can not return normal vision.

Visual Discrimination implies the ability to determine the exact characteristics of a form compared to others of similar characteristics. In the process of learning to read, it is important to have developed visual discrimination, otherwise they would encounter the following difficulties: Confusion of similar words. They confuse similarities and differences. Errors in words with similar beginnings or endings We propose to practice Visual Discrimination in children with these illustrative and entertaining exercises.