Strong Visual Processing Skills Help Your Child Soar

Did you know that your child takes in 75 to 90% of all information visually? Seeing is our primary learning sense and when your child has strong visual processing skills, reading, writing, spelling, and math are a breeze.

Almost everything we do relies on the powerful sense of sight.

Sadly, many things can go wrong with not only the eyes but how the brain processes this sense. 

By definition, a visual processing disorder is a learning disability in which the student has a difficult time processing information that is seen. 

Students with weak visual processing skills process visual information incorrectly and this skews the way they not only perceive printed materials but how they interact in life.

What It’s Like to Have Weak Visual Processing Skills

Children with weak visual processing skills might skip lines when reading or reverse letters while writing. They line up math columns incorrectly. 

They have a difficult copying information, especially from the board. These kids are often messy, disorganized, and seem “lost” a lot of the time.

Although bright, kids who struggle in this area have a hard time finding similarities and differences in visual information and therefore have a hard time succeeding academically.

This is because the letters or words are not perceived in a consistent manner. 

These children have a hard time noting subtle differences between shapes, letters, words, or numbers. This, of course, makes it difficult to percieve visual information correctly!

Most people don’t know that we “see” with our brains but take in light with our eyes.  Of course, a lot more goes into seeing than this, but it’s important to know the brain’s role in seeing. 

Parents often think that getting a child glasses will help weak visual processing skills, but it won’t.  Of course, if your child sees better, that helps overall learning, but glasses usually just correct focusing or astigmatism and don’t help processing visual information.

Processing Visual Information in the Brain.

​In order to correctly process visual stimulation, your child must have proper binocular vision. This is where two eyes work together to make one image.

Sometimes, kids can’t seem to coordinate both eyes with each other, so the images they take in might be blurred or distorted.

Since they were born with this condition, it’s difficult for them to let us know something is wrong!

Eye muscle movement is another factor that contributes to visual processing disorders. 

Your child’s eye muscles must be strong and move fluidly across a page in order to read efficiently and effectively. 

Each eye has six muscles holding it in place. 

Like any muscle in the body, weaknesses can occur.  Also, the muscles might not allow the eyes to line up correctly, and this affects how the student processes visual information.

If your child has weak eyes muscles, there’s a quick and efficient solution!

All muscles can be strengthened with specific, targeted exercises. It’s just like lifting weights for strength – only for perception.

The Right Program Makes all the Difference!

There are many things that can interfere with proper vision and sight. If your child is struggling to learn or has been diagnosed with a learning disability, it’s important to find a program that strengthens visual processing skills can reach academic success can be achieved.

Choosing the right program for kids with learning disabilities is crucial because it directly shapes how effectively they can learn, build confidence, and develop independence.

A well-matched program provides tailored instruction that aligns with a child’s specific needs – whether that involves specialized teaching methods, smaller class sizes, or targeted support services.

Instead of feeling frustrated or left behind, children in the right environment are more likely to experience success, which boosts their self-esteem and motivation to keep learning.

Bravo! Tutoring’s program and Learning Evaluation will identify strengths, not just challenges. This allows kids to grow in areas where they can excel.

Over time, the right support can make a lasting difference in academic progress, social development, and overall well-being, setting a strong foundation for future success.

How Visual Processing Skills Help Your Child

If your child is struggling to read, write, spell, or perform math equations, there is probably an underlying visual processing disorder that is responsible.

Following is a list and explanation of visual processing skills that we address at Bravo! Tutoring.

Eye Tracking Skills Help Your Child “See” Correctly

Eye tracking is your child’s ability to move the eyes fluidly across a page. When eye tracking skills are strong, it speeds up the learning process because eye movements are smooth. Your child isn’t slowed down by jerky muscle movement.

Just like a child with stronger leg muscles can run faster than a child with weak leg muscles, a good student will usually have strong eye muscles and will move them fluidly across print.

Also, copying from the board and taking notes will be easier for the child with strong eye muscle movement.

At Bravo! Tutoring, your child practices moving the eyes across a page from left to right through various activities. Kids slowly build up eye muscle strength and this quickly tranlates to better learning, comprehension, and fluency.

Eye/hand Coordination Skills Help Your Child Write

Eye/hand coordination is one of the most important visual processing skills your child can have for learning success.

Simply put, eye/hand coordination is your child’s ability to coordinate visual information with the hands. When your child’s eyes can smoothly direct attention to the hands, then a learning task can be executed.

When there is a hiccup in this communication process, it is hard to write. A problem with this visual processing skill can also affect reading, even though the hands aren’t used much in this subject area.

Many times, a block or misinformation occurs so that eye/hand coordination is weak. This is usually first noted in a lack of skill in drawing or writing. 

Students with poor eye/hand coordination struggle adversely with writing and performing fine motor skills activities. When papers are messy, words and letters are copied incorrectly, and writing is illegible, it’s hard to make good grades.

In the Orange Level of the Bravo! Learning System, your child will focus on building strong eye/hand coordination skills. This, in turn, helps build a strong learning foundation.

Visual Closure Helps Your Child “See” What isn’t There

Visual closure is one of our most important visual processing skills. This is the ability to visualize a complete whole when given incomplete information or a partial picture of something. 

When your child’s visual closure abilities are weak, then it is difficult to glance at a letter, number, or word and fill in possible missing information to gain meaning.

In essence, the crucial visual cues for meaning are missing or weak.

Visual closure abilities help your child read and comprehend by quickly filling in missing or incomplete information. 

The eyes don’t have to individually process every letter or word when visual closure skills are strong. As your child reads, writes, spells, or performs math equations, there is a constant “filling in for meaning process” that goes on. If this process is weak or stunted, it takes longer to find the missing information and put meaning to it.

This, in turn, means your child is behind before even starting!

Strong visual closure skills are particularly helpful for understanding inferences and predicting outcomes while reading. And everyone knows, your child reads for meaning!

Finding the Difference with Visual Discrimination

Visual discrimination skills allow your child to see the differences between objects that are similar and compare those that are different.

This visual processing skill is especially important for academic success because it involves the ability to perceive letters, numbers, and words and note their differences. This helps your child apply meaning through comparison.

Students who have problems with visual discrimination do not focus on the individual letters of a word and/or note likenesses and differences. This shows up primarily between words as wholes or letters and numbers as part of these wholes.

For example, a child struggling with visual discrimination abilities might see a “b” as a “d” or an “n” as an “h”. Seeing these letters incorrectly affects meaning. This, in turn, affects fluency and comprehension. It’s hard to pass a test when you read words incorrectly!

Visual discrimination problems are common with students who have dyslexia, dysgraphia, or dyscalculia.

Visual Memory Help Your Child Retain Information

Visual memory is the ability to hold pictures or images in the mind. In order to read, write, perform accurate math calculations, and spell words properly, your child needs to hold symbols in visual memory. 

These symbols might be letters, combinations of letters (words), combinations of words (sentences), combinations of sentences (paragraphs), numbers, number combinations, formulas, math facts, spelling words, and variations of different meanings that accompany these symbols. 

Whew! That is a lot. It is amazing that any of us can read, write, spell, or remember how to add, subtract, multiply or divide when you think about it in detail. But as humans, we do have this ability.

But when visual memory is weak, this ability falters, and learning becomes stunted. If your child can’t remember and recall what is learned, then it is hard to pass tests. This directly affects grades and report cards!

There is rule of thumb regarding visual memory abilities. A child should hold one symbol or image in the mind for each year of life – tapping out at seven symbols. 

Visual Memory: the Mini-Marathon

If you think about it, we have seven digits in a telephone number and seven digits in our driver’s licenses. Most multi-syllable words don’t contain too many more letters than seven.

At Bravo! Tutoring, we help your child achieve six symbols for visual memory mastery. This proves to be more than enough for your child to succeed at school and in life.

​Kids with visual memory issues don’t seem to have any “glue” in their brains to hold these symbols in place. Thankfully, this is a skill that can be built up, like training for a marathon. 

When someone first starts training for a marathon, long distances are difficult. But with consistent, targeted practice, muscles build up and soon running becomes easier.

The same can be said for visual memory. This visual processing skill can be built up over a period of time so your child can hold six to seven distinct images in the mind. 

Here’s the good news. Visual memory abilities are not a sign of intelligence. Visual memory is a skill – just like riding a bike or typing on a keyboard.

​As a side note, with modern technology, visual memory skills seem to be getting weaker and weaker with our children. They don’t have to wait long for images to form in their brains due to high-speed internet. They don’t have to remember phone numbers at all due to smart phones where all you have to do is press a button. You get the idea!

Directionality – Which Way to Turn?

​Students with visual processing skills issues often suffer with directionality problems. Directionality is the ability to understand and use directions such as left, right, over, under, beside, and above. 

In essence, kids who struggle with directionality don’t understand the directions of objects in relation to their bodies and how their bodies fit into space. 

Children with directionality issues will have problems understanding oral directions as well, since they can’t seem to find a place to “categorize” them in. Written tasks will often reveal reversals in letters and words as well. 

For example, when doing a worksheet, a child with directionality issues will often find it difficult to know to start at the top left-hand part of the page and move from left to right until the page is completed in an organized manner.

This child might start at the top, skip down to the bottom, then go back to the right hand side of the middle, and try to fill in the answers this way. Often, answers are wrong or just not finished because this is an unorganized way to attack a task.

A child with directionality issues will often appear to be clumsy as well. It is difficult to get the body to move in the right direction if the mental component isn’t primed to tell the body how to move.

​A child with dyslexia will almost always have directionality problems. This is why reversals are so common in kids with dyslexia.

There is good news, though. Once again, poor directionality abilities aren’t a sign of intelligence!

Directionality is a skill that can be practiced and increased until your child understands where directions are in regard to not only the body but how they fit in to reading, writing, math, and spelling.

Eye Muscle Alignment Keeps Images and Print Clear

Did you know that each of your child’s eyeballs is held in place by six muscles? These muscles, of course, control the movement of the eye. 

Each eye works in its own way, but it also must work in conjunction with the other eye. They are a team!

If your child’s eye muscles are weak in any way, then it is difficult to move the eyes fluidly across a page. When this is difficult, reading is slowed down. Your child might stammer, stutter, or read words and letters incorrectly.

With regular, targeted exercises, the eye muscles can be strengthened. The activities are easy to do, and when the muscles are strong, the eyes can move properly across print.

This leads to better fluency, comprehension, and note taking skills. When your child is an excellent reader and note-taker, school isn’t difficult and grades soar!

Suppression is When the Brain Shuts Down an Eye

Sometimes when eye muscles are not working properly, suppression can occur. This is when the brain will intermittently shut down an eye so the student is in essence “blind” for short periods of time.

Of course, this will affect the student’s ability to read, write, and perform other academic skills. 

The stronger eye will take over and the weaker eye will continue to become weaker, popping in and out of the student’s field of vision.

If your child has suppression, most likely it has always been there. This makes it hard to relate that something is wrong, because it always has felt that way.

Kids with suppression learn to use both eye correctly with easy visual processing activities. Patching both eyes is one of the most important things we do that allows the brain to equally turn on the “seeing power” of both eyes!

Proper Focusing Skills Start with Accommodation

Accommodation is is the ability to focus the eyes from far to near in an easy, fluid manner.

If your child struggles with reading, writing, spelling, and math, there might be an accommodation issue at play.

Children who struggle in this area have a difficult time transitioning from the board to their paper or book, and then back to the board again. 

Because this is so difficult, then your child is always a step behind, making it hard to keep up with peers!

Accommodation can also affect the student’s ability to even copy from a book to a paper. If your child or student hates copying or has a difficult time with it, then accommodation is probably the culprit. 

This visual processing skill is easy to correct with fun exercises where your child practices focusing targets from near to far and far to near.

The Importance of Visual Perceptual Skills

Visual perceptual skills are the brain’s interpretation of what your child sees. It is paramount that the brain and visual system connect in a manner that is easy to perceive visual stimulus to form clear and understandable images.

Kids with poor perceptual skills view visual information in distorted, skewed, slanted, or incorrect ways. Words, letters, and numbers might have halos around them or appear to be blurred.

In addition, the visual information might be tilted, angled, upside down, or wiggling. Your child might be viewing the world in constant motion! Can you imagine how difficult concentrating would be if this happened?

Children with dyslexia commonly struggle with this typ of visual processing skills disorder. Once again, struggling with visual perceptual skills issues is not a sign of intelligence. It is a sign of viewing the world incorrectly.

Simple, fun exercises can help your child view the world as it should be seen.

When halos (or other abberations) around words, letters, or numbers are gone, it’s easy to see what is there – instead of what isn’t there!

Visual Figure Ground:

This is a property of perception where there is a tendency to see parts of a visual field as solid, well-defined objects standing out against a less distinct background. Students who are weak in this area don’t differentiate between the objects that stick out and the background. This affects their ability to read, write, spell, and perform mathematics exercises because it is difficult for them to judge where letters and numbers start and finish, how to weed out unimportant visual stimuli, and how to make sense of the jumble that appears to them in a variety of different avenues.

Visual Motor Integration:

This is one of our most basic foundational skills, one that is the “foundation of the learning house” that we are building. It is difficult to reach higher level, executive functioning skills when this skill, and other basic skills are weak.

Years ago, teachers spent a lot of time teaching students handwriting skills, which in turn, strengthened their visual motor integration skills. Today, teachers rarely have time to teach handwriting in such a way, as they are hard pressed to teach so many academic skills.

Visual motor integration consists of coordinating visual perceptual skills together with gross motor movement and fine motor movement as well as the ability to integrate visual input with motor output. With that said, an easier definition is the ability of the brain, the hands, and the body to communicate effectively. Students with visual motor integration problems have a difficult time writing. Artwork is usually sloppy and these students have a difficult time staying within lines on paper. 

Their writing bunches together or flows off the lines unevenly and they have a difficult time judging where curves and lines should connect or separate. Copying and any other pencil and paper tasks are extremely difficult for students with this problem.

It is possible to go back and make this skill strong, which in turn will affect higher level skills.

Visual Sequential Memory:

Visual Sequential Memory is the ability to remember forms or characters in correct order. This skill is particularly important for spelling. Letter omissions, additions, or transpositions within words are common for children who struggle with this skill. In addition, it is obvious that this skill is also important for reading and writing, as the line-up of the letters will greatly affect fluency and comprehension. If a student is misreading words, then it will slow the student down immensely, as he will have to keep backtracking and filling in missed or incorrectly read information.

​Eye Movement:

Parents often ask if their children need an eye exam. Well, of course, that is a good thing to do, but we need to keep in mind that although eye doctors can deal with a multitude of eye issues that focusing alone isn’t the cure all for visual processing issues.  

Saccades are rapid movements of the eyes that quickly and abruptly change the point of fixation. They range from the small movements made while reading to the much larger movements such as looking across a room or out into the distance. Saccades can occur voluntarily but happen reflexively whenever the eyes are open. 

It is obvious to see how eye movements, whether close-up or far away, affect not only learning and academics (think of watching a teacher instructing on a board or overhead as well as close-up work such as worksheets or reading a book).

Spatial Awareness:

Spatial awareness is an organized awareness of the objects in the space around us as well as an awareness of our body’s position in space. Without this awareness, we would not be able to pick food up from our plates and put in our mouths. We would have trouble reading, because we could not see the letters in their correct relation to each other and to the page. 

Spatial awareness requires that we have a model of the three-dimensional space around us, and it requires that we can integrate information from all of our senses.

Studies have suggested a link between a well-developed sense of spatial awareness and artistic creativity, as well as success in math. It can also be important in organize and classify abstract mental concepts is related to the ability t organize and classify objects in space.  Visual thinkers, in particular, will tend to use their visual imagination to organize abstract thought.

Because spatial awareness requires integrating the information from the different senses into the three-dimensional model of the world provided by the vestibular system, activities which refine the vestibular system and develop sensory integration can refine all aspects of brain processing.

Binocular Teaming:

Binocular teaming is the ability of both eyes to work together to provide accurate information to the brain. Binocularity and stereopsis (the working together of the two eyes in providing different views to the brain which are integrated into one image) are important visual processing skills are responsible for providing depth perception. 

These visual perception skills are necessary in order to perform a variety of visual tasks such as tracking, fixation, convergence, and visual motor integration. These tasks are important for reading, writing, spelling, performing math functions, and succeeding in the classroom or workplace.

Fixation:

This is how the eye maintains a visual gaze on a single location. Inadequate fixation skills must be addressed early in a treatment program before other higher level visual skills are attempted because it is a foundational skill upon which the others are built upon. 

In order to evaluate a student’s fixation, hold a small target, such a tongue depressor with a dot on it about fifteen inches from the student’s eyes and ask the student to keep his eyes on the target without looking away. 

Observe if he is able to maintain a steady gaze without pulling his eyes away.  Another way to measure this is to patch one of the student’s eyes and repeat the process as described above.  Watch to see if the eye is jumpy or jerky. Patch the other eye and repeat the process.

​

​