Good visual perception is an important skill, especially for school success.

Children need to understand visual perception to discriminate well, copy text accurately, develop visual memory of things observed, develop good eye-hand coordination and integrate visual information while using other senses in order to perform tasks like recognizing the source of a sound.

Visual perception is a complex process. It includes color perception and color constancy, shape perception and shape constancy, spatial relations, visual analysis and synthesis, visual closure, visual figure-ground distinction, and visual sequence.

Visual closure is the ability to complete an incomplete image e.g. a dot-to-dot picture or a puzzle. Because we are learning about monsters, we used black markers and crayons to create our own monsters. This was an open-ended activity, so there was no right or wrong way to complete their creatures! Visual perception skills (through activities such as these) can be developed and improved with practice, until they become skills that are performed almost effortlessly.

Children delight in making choices. The ability to name a favorite color of paper to make a drawing empowers a child. When he can ask for a square or triangle-shaped block by name during a game, he has a sense of control over his environment.

In preschool, children can learn to identify and name circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, and ovals. By using materials such as posters, blocks, books, and games, teachers expose children to various shapes and help them analyze two- and three-dimensional shapes in various sizes and orientations.

For this reason, we are constantly incorporating shapes into our schedule. During circle time, we may sing a song about trapezoids. For gross motor play, we may jump onto triangle-shaped chalk outlines.

For this activity, we broke up into groups to categorize a variety of monster “shapes”. We learned about the word rhombus, diamond, triangle, rectangle, and square.

Encouraging preschoolers to slide, flip, or turn shapes promotes problem solving and an understanding of transformations.

These transformations are crucial to developing spatial visualization abilities and understanding geometry, which involves matching shapes through visualization.

As preschoolers learn to identify objects, they can use spatial orientation vocabulary to describe the relative positions of objects.