Sometimes an activity can be just easy to throw together and the kids love it. This Heart Maze is a simple visual perception activity that can be adapted to any season or shape. We used hearts for a Valentine’s Day occupational therapy activity, while practicing visual scanning, visual spatial relations, line awareness, and eye-hand coordination…and had a lot of fun doing it!
Heart Maze Activity
This heart maze activity is an easy way to work on visual perceptual skills needed for tasks like handwriting, reading, and learning. The hearts are placed in a path-like maze that challenges visual perception skills.
Visual Perception Activity
Kids can help with making this Valentine’s Day maze, or you can make a template and copy it over and over again. Let’s discuss how this maze works and how it and other visual perception skills helps kids with reading, learning, reading, and writing.
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It really doesn’t get much easier. Grab a piece of pink card stock and cut out a quick heart. Trace the heart on a piece of white paper. Continue tracing, positioning the hearts in a line. You want a “maze” to form around the paper.
Fill in the blank space with more heart outlines, but this time, rotate the shape so it’s positioned randomly and not as close to the maze.
Cut more hearts from the pink card stock. We used a darker shade to work on patterns as we filled in the maze.
Lining up the hearts requires eye-hand coordination to position the card stock hearts within the outlines. Using the hands in a coordinated manner based on visual input is an important skill for many functional tasks including handwriting and scissor use.
What Are Visual Spatial Relations?
Visual spatial relations is the ability to identify a form/shape/letter despite being rotated, and identify it as being rotated. Children need visual spatial relations to identify the difference between a “b” and “d” and “p”, and “q”.
This sheet full of hearts that look the same requires the child to identify the hearts that are following a path. Some of the hearts not along the path are rotated and the child should be able to identify by scanning, the hearts that are rotated.
Looking for more Visual Perception Activities?
Try these: Smashing Peanuts Activity
Toys to Improve Visual Perception
Tangrams and Visual Perception
Visual Perception Activities
Need help fixing visual processing problems?
Know a student with identified visual processing problems…but difficulties are brushed over or missed in the school setting?
Have a kiddo on your caseload that struggles with visual tracking, fixation, eye teaming, or visual scanning?
Need tools to incorporate visual perception and visual-motor strategies right into the classroom?
Wondering how to help kids who can not visually attend to an object in order to focus for more than a few seconds?
The Visual Processing Bundle is a comprehensive resource on oculomotor skills, visual perception, visual-motor skills.
Details about The Visual Processing Bundle:
- Over 235 pages of tools, activities, resources, informaton, and strategies to address visual processing needs
- Classroom accommodation ideas for visual perception challenges
- Checklists for trialing various activities and strategies
- 2 leveled visual-motor integration workbooks…with data collection tools to monitor progress
- Pencil control worksheets to integrate visual input and motor work in meaningful ways
- Classroom activities that can be incorporated into reading, spelling, math, and other subjects…reducing the amount of extra “work”
- Activity cards to guide therapy warm-up sessions or used in home program development
- Specific and open-ended activity cards to address visual attention and spatial awareness
- Visual tracking guide explain components of visual tracking and specific activities to improve tracking
- SO much more!
