I often use my Remedial Therapy training at home with my children, to help ensure that they get the stimulation to develop the skills needed for school and learning. Today I thought to jot down the importance of Visual Foreground/Background development and a few easy ways to practice and encourage it.
Figure-ground perception is one of the Visual Perceptual Skills. It is the ability to discriminate one object from another with a busy background. This is also known as Visual Foreground-Background. With the acquired skill, students are able to bring the focused object to the front and let everything else drift into the background. Examples of this could be:
- spotting a bird in the tree.
- identifying the blue square in a box of shapes (when colors and shapes are already known).
- finding a word in a sentence.
Students who have not acquired this perceptual skill may have trouble:
- reading – they lose there place in the sentence or on the page.
- copying or reading from the board.
- finding a certain pencil in a cluttered pencil bag.
- completing instructions like fetching a certain book from the shelf.
- staying focused on work presented on the board or screen – they will lose their place.
Some activities which I do with my children to help aid the development of this skill include:
- Sorting objects by searching for certain ones first e.g pasta shapes, foam letters or shapes, blocks, Nespresso pods.
- Sorting socks and matching them to form pairs.
- Playing “I spy…” in the garden, in a picture book or around the house (if your child/student is not familiar with the alphabet yet, search for colors, shapes or specific objects).
- Building Jig-Saw puzzles – focus on the small details.
- Printable age appropriate mazes.
- Printable worksheets where students have to color and search for certain objects.
My daughter is busy learning becoming more familiar with the alphabet. Below you can see her completing one of my Alphabet Foreground and Background Coloring pages. She first identified which letter she needs to color in and then the corresponding picture. She also practiced her letter formation by completing the sentence at the bottom of the page.
Should you be interested in these fun coloring pages, visit my TpT store by clicking on the image below. You can download the first page for FREE from the Preview so be sure to test before you buy.
