An activity focused on two similar pictures with a few clear differences can help teach children to discern pictorial variations, according to HighReach Learning, an early childhood education curriculum provider. With two pictures of a city park that have only 10 differences, for example, an red balloon could appear in one picture but not in the other. Or, the balloon could be present in both pictures, but in different colors.
Children naturally gravitate toward toys, and using them as a centerpiece in a visual discrimination activity can help maintain their focus, suggests School Sparks, an online resource for educators operated by a former kindergarten teacher. Teachers or parents could build an activity around a pair of similar toys, such as a red model truck with three wheels and a blue truck with four wheels. As the child plays with the trucks, parents and teachers can ask her to compare the differences.
Combining visual discrimination activities into other first-grade lessons, such as reading time, can help "sneak" in these valuable lessons, School Sparks points out. One example would be read-aloud sentences that focus on similar yet specific words, such as "saw" and "was." A sentence such as "The boy I saw was Bobby" would challenge students to discriminate between similar groupings of letters within a short sentence.
Art projects also help reinforce ideas of visual discrimination, reports HighReach Learning. Parents and teachers can challenge students to create a project with various shades of only one color. For example, a student could create something in any yellow shade he chooses, but no blue could be included. Other projects could focus on specific shapes; for instance, children could use only round objects to create a collage, with no square items allowed.
Some children may have problems with one aspect of visual discrimination, according to Cusimano. When creating activities for first-grade students, teachers and parents shouldn't overlook numbers, as these may pose separate challenges for certain children. Incorporating math games appropriate for the student's comprehension level can help, but the focus should be on the specific numbers used in the math games. Numbers that look similar, such as 6 and 9 or 3 and 8, should be grouped within the same problem, stresses School Sparks.