Building puzzles, building skills at Stanford Creative Works

Many children we see in our school-based program have difficulties with their visual perception skills. This means that information that is received through the eyes and sent to the brain is not processed in a way that makes sense. Conseqeuntly children reverse letters, and have irregular writting patterns or struggle to read fluently.

For visual perceptual skills to be used adequately by the brain in every day live the child needs to have internalized the concepts of colour, shape and size. Children can build up and train their visual perception through the medium of play. They can play ball, play with blocks or build puzzles.

This week we offered a puzzle building session at the creative workshops with different sized puzzles for the different age groups and skills level of children who participated. The kids worked individually but also formed groups to build the bigger puzzles.

The session was full of good team spirit and the children were proud of the finished product.

by Regina Broenner