Have you ever wondered why your child reading aloud is a dreaded activity by both you and your child?
Have you ever thought about why your child just can’t blend letters together or recognize familiar words?
The root cause could be as simple as your child’s visual closure perception skills are immature and require strengthening.
Visual closure is the brain’s ability to recognize a familiar item, word or picture when only a small part of it is shown. When reading, visual closure allows us to quickly recognize letters and words without having to fully interpret them as our brain fills in the information through visual closure. This allows us to increase reading efficiency.
Children who struggle with visual closure often have difficulty reading because they must look at and process each letter in a word.
Sounding out words is a much less efficient way of reading as this not only makes reading slow and painful but also makes it very difficult to comprehend and visualize the material.
Activities to help your child master this skill:
Partially hide an object and encourage your child to find the missing item. (this game can be played with a young child or toddler).
Completion of jigsaw puzzles.
Draw half a picture and allow the child to complete the picture to make the two sides the same (symmetry).
Dot to dot puzzles – ask your child to try and guess what the picture will be before connecting the dots. If unable initially, ask again halfway through.
Guess what? Games, where a portion of an object is revealed a little at a time until your child can ascertain what it is.
Word searches.
Scrabble.
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