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Visual Motor Scanning Activity to Color Match

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Visual Motor Integration is also known as eye hand coordination.  Essentially, this skill is the ability to coordinate the hand in an effective manner directed by vision.  When relying on visual motor skills, a person coordinates their movements based on what they see.  A child requires effective visual motor skills in order to do so many tasks…forming letters, writing on a line, coloring within lines, cutting along a line, catching a ball, completing puzzles, reading, and so much more. 
This fun (and colorful) activity is easy to create at home and a fun way to work on visual motor integration.  We added a color matching component to our activity, but you can adjust this activity to include what ever best keeps your child’s attention.
Visual scanning and visual motor color matching activity for kids

Visual Motor Color Matching Activity

This post contains affiliate links. 
I started by drawing small circles all over a sheet of construction paper.  I used a bunch of different colors that matched the colors of stickers we had.  These rainbow stickers are the perfect size for little fingers to peel and work on fine motor skills.
Use stickers to color match and work on eye-hand coordiantion, fine motor skills.
I had Baby Girl (aged 2 and a half) peel off the stickers and place them on the circles.  Scanning for the matching color works on those eye-hand coordination abilities and also works on color identification. 
This was also a great way for Little Guy (age 4) to work on his visual motor skills.  He’s working on letter formation and ability to write in a smaller space with better control.  The fine motor and visual motor work in the activity are perfect for the new hand writer.
Eye hand coordination is tested and practiced with this easy color matching activity for kids.

This is such an easy way to work on so many skills.  We’ll be doing this activity again, for sure, with a few modifications.  Instead of matching colors to colored circles, try matching letters, numbers, emotions, and more!

What are other ways you can work on visual motor skills at home?

 

    • Tic Tack Toe

 

    • Copying shapes/drawings

 

    • tracing paper

 

    • mazes

 

    • dot to dot pictures

 

    • pegboard designs

 

    • copying lite brite designs

 

    • rolling and catching a ball

 

    • flashlight tag

Visual Scanning Activities

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visual scanning activities

These Visual Scanning activities support the essential visual skill needed for functional tasks. Here, we are covering specific strategies to support the ability to scan during daily tasks, all through play-based visual processing activities. Related, is this resource on scanning activities for reading, which is a very functional occupation and a part of learning impacted by reading.

Visual Scanning Activities

First, it’s important to cover what visual scanning is.

Visual scanning is an essential part of so many functional skills.  What is visual scanning?  When you’re reading a line of text in a book, you shift your eyes left to right across the page without losing your place. 

When you get to the end of the line, you shift your eyes down to the next line without jumping your vision all over the page.  Without this ability, reading would be quite difficult!

Read more to find activities to support this visual skill including visual scanning games, visual scanning occupational therapy activities, and other visual scanning exercises that teachers, therapists, and parents can use to develop the skills kids need!


Try this fun and easy visual scanning activity.

Other areas where visual scanning is important: watching a moving target such as following the ball in sports, completing mazes and word searches, cutting shapes with scissors, tracing lines, spacing letters in handwriting, and so much more.

These features are great ways to practice visual scanning skills in a fun and creative way.



Visual Scanning Activities

 

Kids will love these visual scanning activities to use in occupational therapy activities. They are creative and fun ways to work on visual scanning to improve reading and comprehension skills.
 

 

 

 
Visual scanning for words

Sight Word Blast Off Game from There’s Just One Mommy~ In this activity, encourage your kids to scan the page with just their eyes.  Prompt them to keep their head still as they move their eyes to scan for letters and words.

Match colors and sort for visual scanning activities

Seek and Sort Color Game from Where Imagination Grows~  Scanning for objects is a great way to practice visual motor skills.

Color matching games are great for visual scanning activities

Color Pattern Matching Game from The Connection We Share~ Scanning for colors and patterns practices those skills needed for functional tasks like handwriting.

Visual scanning printables

Dot Printables from Tot Schooling~  Filling in the dots requires eye-hand coordination, which is an essential part of visual motor skills.

Looking for more visual scanning activities for the kids?  Try some of these:

 

 


 
 

More Visual Scanning Activities you will love: 

Play Dough Color Match Learning Activity

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Play dough is such a fun way to play and learn.  We are big fans of the fine motor fun to be had with play dough.  In fact, we’ve done other fine motor color matching activities with play dough before.  Color matching with play dough is a fun way for preschoolers and toddlers to learn colors and so much more.
 This play dough activity was great for the Toddler age range.  Learning colors, matching, sorting, and fine motor work were all involved.  Baby Girl was a big fan!  

Color matching and learning activity for Toddlers and Preschoolers

 

 {This post contains affiliate links.  In other words, this blog will receive monetary compensation when any purchases are made through the links in this post.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected.  You can read our full disclosure policy here.  As always, we thank you for your support and community here at Sugar Aunts}  
Kids can identify colors of play dough.

Color identification activity for Toddlers

We started with a bunch of colors of play dough.  We used modeling dough, but you could also make your own play dough for learning and play.   We worked on naming all of the colors of the play dough.
Kids can work on many fine motor skills with play dough and paper clips.

Color matching activity for Toddlers

I pulled out a bunch of colored paper clips
and showed Baby Girl how to press them into the matching color.  She did pretty well with the matching of colors.  The identification is a little harder for her.  She’ll name some of the colors but stumble on others.  (Baby Girl is 2.5 years old).  She’s getting there, though!  I love that she loves activities like this.  She was really into it.

 

I love the colors of this dough!

 

Fine Motor Activity for Toddlers, Preschoolers, and School-aged Children

Pressing those paper clips into the dough requires a tripod grasp.  The resistance of the dough is a great way to strengthen the hand, especially the arches of the hand.  This is so important for manipulating objects in self-care tasks like buttoning.  This is a great pre-handwriting activity, too.  Definitely, it’s a good warm-up activity for kids who are at the writing stage.  Pressing those paper clips into the dough would get the hand “awake” and ready for a coloring or handwriting task for older kids.  I would recommend this activity for the school aged range, too.

Picking up paper clips from a flat surface is a great way to work on fine motor skills.

Picking up the paper clips from a flat surface like the table is a great way to work on finger dexterity with children.  You’ll need a tip to tip grasp to pick up the paper clip and manipulate it within your hand.  What a work out for those little hand muscles!  In-hand manipulation is essential for tasks like managing coins, rotating a pencil in handwriting tasks, putting small objects like pegs into peg boards, and so much more.  Scatter those paper clips around the table…this is a great way to play and work on fin motor skills!

Toddlers can work on fine motor skills with play dough.

If you’re doing this activity with a younger child, be sure to keep a close eye on them.  As always, use your judgment in what works best for your child or group of children in a school setting.  The paper clips could be a choking hazard of course so if you are working with kids who may put them in their mouth, either work on one clip at a time or put this activity away for a few months.  Better yet, pin it to your Pinterest boards for safe remembering 😉

How many other ways can you think of to make this activity a learning opportunity?  Try sorting the paper clips by color or size.  Pattern the colors of dough or paper clips.  Count the paper clips as your child presses them into the dough.  Ask him or her to press a certain number of clips into each dough ball.  Sequence the number of paper clips that you’ve pressed into the dough.  There is SO much learning happening here!

Looking for more play dough activities?  We’ve been having a blast pinning to our play dough, clay, goop, and more board:

Glass Gems on the Light Table

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We made our own colorful glass gems to use on a light table for a sensory activity and creative painting activity. These glass gems are fun to make and build fine motor skills.

Glass Gems

Do you have a light box or ever used one?  It’s a super cool way to play, learn, and explore.  We’ve done an attempt at a DIY light box before but weren’t too happy with the long term results of it. 

It worked well for tracing and handwriting practice, checking out a few cool manipulatives on the lights, but…well, you can read about our thoughts in the end.  We wanted to try another attempt and so this time, we did something just as simple and easy, but it worked WAY better. 

That post should be up this week.  For now, we wanted to share what we’ve been playing with on the light box.  Our own DIY colored glass gems!

 
 


 
Create your own colored glass gems easily for learning, decor, and play.

 

DIY Glass Gems

These cuties were very easy to make and VERY fun to play with.  We’ve been sorting, counting, patterning, and making shapes with our colored gems and on the light box, do they ever look awesome!

 

Use your colored glass gems on the light table for learning and play.

 

 

Check out that light shining through our gems!  WOW!  Seriously, this was so cool.  So, how did we make these gorgeous gems??

 

Create your own colored glass gems in any color for decor, learning, and play
 
Amazon affiliate links are included below.
 
We started out with a pile of assorted colored tissue paper
cut into little squares.   
 
You’ll also need a bunch of clear large glass gems. 
 
We used the 1 and 1/4″ sized gems that are flat on one side.  We found them in the dollar store but the are also available in the link above. 

 

Create your own colored glass gems for learning and play

 

Add a little bit of glue with some water and mix together with a paint brush.

 

Next, trace your gems onto a piece of tissue paper.  I cut out a whole stack at once and it worked well to cover each gem.  A pretty princess pencil makes it more fun 😉

Creating your own colored glass gems is a great activity for kids

 

Baby Girl helped with the next part.  She painted the glue mixture onto the flat side of each gem while I stuck the tissue paper on.

Make your own colored glass gems for learning and play.

 

They are starting to look pretty fun!

colored glass gems for play and learning. These are easy and fun to make your own colors!

 

Once the glue dried, we started playing!  We didn’t even pull out the light box yet.  Just playing with these colored stones on the table was fun.  These would be so pretty in a flat dish with a Spring centerpiece or perfect for math activities.  We sorted, stacked, made shapes, counted, named colors…how many ways can you think of to play and learn with colored gemstones? 

 

Visual Motor Activity for Learning and Scanning, Eye-hand Coordination

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We shared a great bubble wrap activity yesterday and are continuing again today with another fun learning through play activity with the awesomeness of bubble wrap!   This time we did some visual scanning to work on letters of Little Guy’s name, letter sounds (a great pre-reading activity!), color awareness with Baby Girl, and eye-hand coordination as we popped the bubbles.  Sounds like a super fun way to play and learn, right?!?
Visual Motor activities are very important to the pre-hand writer…and new handwrites, too.  Learning to place those letters on the lines and be aware of how much space is left on the page is part of visual-motor skills.  So is line awareness when cutting.  And even, moving with large muscles as we carry items in the home or classroom.  We have to be aware of how much space is around us and this is where visual-motor awareness comes into play.  
Visual scanning (scanning with the eyes across a page, for example) and hand-eye coordination (using the hands in a coordinated manner based on what the eyes are telling us) are both part of Visual Motor Skills.  Visual Motor activities are a fun way to play while working on these important skills.


This visual motor activity is a great way to work on visual scanning, eye-hand coordination, and letter and color awareness.

 

Visual Motor Activity to work on visual scanning and hand-eye coordination

We started our fun with these funny faces stickers from www.craftprojectideas.com/.  We received them free of charge and have been loving the silly faces in our crafts.  The colors were perfect for this activity.  Baby GIrl stuck the stickers onto a piece of paper and together we worked on colors.  She can tell me some of the colors, but most of the time, needs help.  These stickers were a fun way to practice!
Kids can work on color awareness with colored stickers in this visual motor activity.
{Note: This post contains affiliate links.  In other words, this blog will receive monetary compensation when any purchases are made through the links in this post.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected.  You can read our full disclosure policy here.  As always, we thank you for your support and community here at Sugar Aunts.}
Once the stickers were in place, I taped a piece of bubble wrap on top of the stickers.  Now we were ready to get to popping!
Preschoolers will love locating and identifying letters in their name as they visually scan.
Little Guy used a Window Marker
to dot the colored stickers as I called out a color. 

  

Use window markers and scan for colors, letters
He had to visually can the paper to locate the color he needed.  Pushing hard enough with the marker provided a nice “pop” when he dabbed the bubble.  Using his hands in a coordinated way to dab the correct bubble worked on hand-eye coordination.  Because of the bubble wrap on top of the stickers, he had to make sure it was aligned correctly.

Children can visually scan for letters and develop eye-hand coordination to locate letters.
Next, we tried this with the letters in his name.  I had extra letters, plus the letters in his name and asked him to dab all of the ones that he needed for his name.  Scanning across the page in all directions was fun way to explore letter identification as he visually scanned top to bottom and side to side.  He again worked on those hand-eye coordination skills as he popped the correct bubbles.
More playful ways to practice hand-eye coordination and visual scanning :

Thanksgiving Felt Board Patterns Direction Following Turkey

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This Thanksgiving Felt Board activity was just the thing we needed one afternoon when Little Niece and Nephew were at our house.  It was a super cold day and we were happy to stay inside warm and cozy playing and having fun with a few Thanksgiving activities! 

Thanksgiving Felt Board

This felt board was super easy to put together.  I have a big sheet of orange colored fleece fabric that we use for all kinds of activities and play.  It makes the perfect fuzzy background for felt play, pretend play when we need to have an impromptu living room teddy bear picnic, and the perfect baby doll blanket!

This time we used our fleece to make an easel cover for our Felt Board Direction Following Turkey.  
We’ve been doing a lot of turkey crafts and activities leading up to Thanksgiving, and this one was even more fun for the littler ones.  Baby Girl (age 2) and Little Nephew (age 2) both loved moving the felt pieces all over the board.  And worked on fine motor skills and direction following and patterning at the same time!  


This post contains affiliate links.
Just a few supplies are needed for this activity. 
  • The Orange Fleece worked perfectly to hold the felt pieces of our turkey. 
  • The rest of the turkey was easy to make using Assorted felt pieces. 
  • A few brown circles, feathers of different colors, little turkey feet, a beak, and a wattle and our turkey was ready for creating! 
I snipped a few little pieces of felt and glued them to the backs of Googley eyes.  Then the googly eyes could stick to the fleece.
The fleece was perfect to throw over our Easel.  The fleece stayed in place pretty well without sliding much.  With the material up on an included surface, the kids were able to manipulate the pieces of the turkey while using an extended wrist. 
This positioning of their hand while managing small pieces prepares them for handwriting with a proper position of the wrist and fingers while holding a pencil.
I put one turkey together so the Toddlers could see where all of the pieces went. 
This task required visual scanning and direction following.  We put our turkeys together with multi-step directions to add a little difficulty to the task.
Little Guy (age 4) worked on some patters with the feathers.  We used an AB pattern for our turkey feathers.

Little Nephew is a smarty when it comes to identifying colors.  He told us all of the colors of the feathers easily!

Working those little pieces was a great fine motor task for these guys!
They needed to use a pincer grasp to pinch the littlest pieces, all while maintaining that extended wrist. 
We had such fun day with our Turkey patterns, direction following, and fine motor play.  This would be an easy activity to put together in these last days before Thanksgiving!

Motor Planning Spider Web Maze: Fine Motor Eye-Hand Coordination

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This is an updated post from years back.  Create a life-size indoor (or outdoor!) spider maze that kids can climb in, on, around, and through. This is just one of our favorite spider activities for building skills. Add a fine motor portion to the activity and work on vision activities like visual motor planning and hand-eye coordination as kids play this Fall and Halloween.  Happy climbing! 


Visual motor planning and hand-eye coordination with a Halloween or spider theme using this room-sized maze that kids can build and get into and climb around. This is a fun indoor play activity for kids who have a lot of energy. A great fine motor activity for kids too!

Hand-Eye Coordination and Visual Motor Planning Spider Maze

Motor Planning Spider Web Maze with Fine Motor and Eye-hand coordination
(This post contains affiliate links.) Little Guy asked one afternoon, if we could make a Living Room Spider Web.  We made one of these last year, and he remembered.  He remembers every time he sees the skein of red yarn
.
He says he has to work on his “skills” when he’s crawling over, under, and between strings.  All the better to get the bad guys!
We pulled out some chairs and started spinning our web!
Motor Planning Spider Web Maze with Fine Motor and Eye-hand coordination
This time, we added a twist to our Spider Web.  We strung a few Halloween spider rings
along the web.  Little Guy had so much fun pulling the rings along the length of the yarn
, around chair legs, down the slopes, and up and over other pieces of yarn.

Motor Planning Maze:

Moving over, under, and around requires gross motor skills and motor planning to plan out, organize, and carry out an action.  With the added twist of moving the ring along the length of the string, we added a could of extra developmental skills…

Eye-Hand Coordination Maze:

This was a life-sized puzzle for him as he crawled over and under the string to manipulate the plastic ring along the length of the yarn.  What a great visual motor activity for him!  He had to visually scan where the ring would go next, and manage his hands to work the ring along the yarn.

Fine Motor and Bilateral Hand Coordination Maze:

Working both of his hands together in a coordinated manner was essential for this activity, and to move that little spider ring along.  He had to hold the yarn with one hand and string the ring along with the other hand.  All while moving over and under strings below him and above him.
Little Guy LOVED the spider web in our living room.  And asked to make another the next day.  Try this one…you’re little guy or girl will have so much fun!
Visual motor planning and hand-eye coordination with a Halloween or spider theme using this room-sized maze that kids can build and get into and climb around. This is a fun indoor play activity for kids who have a lot of energy. A great fine motor activity for kids too!
More Visual Perceptual Activities you will love:

Cereal Box Fine Motor Coordination Activity for Kids

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Push straws in holes in an empty cereal box

Cereal Box Tripod Grasp, Bilateral hand Coordination, Visual Scanning
We love to use things from the recycle bin in play.  This cereal box was on it’s way out of the kitchen one morning, but first we had a little fun!
While the kids were playing, I used scissors to poke holes all over all sides of the cereal box.  I cut up a couple of straws into little pieces and put both on our train table for the kids to discover. 
This is a recycle bin project that focuses on fine motor skills.
Cereal Box Tripod Grasp, Bilateral hand Coordination, Visual Scanning
Baby Girl was the first to see this and knew right away what to do.  She started pushing the straws into the little holes.
Cereal Box Tripod Grasp, Bilateral hand Coordination, Visual Scanning

Tripod Grasp Activity for Kids

This was a fun activity for her and she played for the longest time.  She really worked her fine motor skills to grasp the little bits of straws…using a tripod grasp and tip to tip grasp to hold the straws and push them through the holes.
Cereal Box Tripod Grasp, Bilateral hand Coordination, Visual Scanning

Bilateral Hand Activity for Kids

She demonstrated bilateral hand coordination (using both hands together in a coordinated manner) to turn the box over and around looking for little holes. 

Visual Scanning Activity for Kids

This was a great way to practice visual scanning as she searched for holes to push the straw pieces into.

Note: always use caution when playing with one of the activities posted on this blog.  Adult supervision and caution should always be exercised and activities should be tailored to meet the needs and abilities of your child.

Invitation to Pour. Scoop. Transfer: Fine Motor Play

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We’ve had a bag of mixed nuts with shells sitting out in our living room for days now.  A couple of bowls and spoons make for a fun play activity for all times of the day!

Use this fine motor activities to teach kids hand dominance while working on bilateral coordination, visual motor skills, and more! 





Invitation to Scoop, Pour, Transfer

Scooping Fine Motor Coordination
I gave the kids a couple of bowls and spoons with the walnuts, almonds, chestnuts…and a few other ones that I’m not sure of the names 🙂 …and they immediately started pouring from bowl to bowl.

Invitation to Transfer

Baby Girl (almost 2) and Little Guy (4) have been loving this!  Little Guy’s been sorting the chestnuts into a pile and gathering them all up into a bowl.  Baby Girl has been pouring and transferring nuts from bowl to bowl…and scattering the nuts allllll over the place 🙂

 Invitation to Pour

This is such a great fine motor activity for little ones, and they love playing with a novel item.  Pouring requires precise bilateral hand coordination or the nuts scatter all over the table…Although, they seem to enjoy that just as much!

Invitation to Scoop

Scooping the nuts with spoons allows for a great fine motor activity and fine motor coordination development, too.  Baby Girl is getting some great spoon practice with this activity!
 I’m thinking the walnuts, almonds, and friends will be out on the train table for a few more days for fun and exploring!
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