Visual Motor Skills, Activities and Goals for Occupational Therapy

As a school-based occupational therapist, you have the opportunity to help students struggling with tasks that require visual motor skills – activities like copying from the board, tying their shoes, throwing or catching. Visual motor skills are critical for everyday functioning, and strengthen them can help kids thrive in the school setting and beyond. Here’s a refresher on visual motor skills, along with visual motor integration activities, IEP goals and resources for school OTs.

Visual Perceptual Skills

Visual perception is multi-faceted and complex and requires various skills including (Cincinnati Children’s):

• Figure ground discrimination – Ability to find an object in a grouping or against a background
• Form constancy – Ability to identify similar objects even if they are of different size, color, etc.
• Visual discrimination – Ability to match objects that are the same
• Visual closure – Ability to identify similar objects even if a part of one is missing
• Visual memory – Ability to recall visual information

Visual Motor Skills

Visual motor skills (or visual motor integration) involve the eyes, brain and body. The skills needed for visual motor integration include:

• Visual perception – The ability to interpret the surrounding environment through vision (see components above)
• Motor control – The ability to regulate movement
• Eye-hand coordination – The ability to move eyes and hands together to perform tasks

Signs of Visual Motor Deficit

School-based occupational therapists and others who work with children can be vigilant for several different signs that may hint at possible visual motor deficits. Children with visual motor integration challenges may struggle with:

• Handwriting
• Completing mazes
• Copying from the board
• Coloring within the lines
• Catching or kicking a ball
• Lining up math problems
• Recognizing patterns
• Reading
• Reversing letters
• Drawing, copying shapes
• Bumping into objects

Visual Motor Integration Activities

The great news for school-based OTs is research shows “intervention, including occupational therapy, can effectively improve visual-motor skills in preschool-aged children (The American Journal of Occupational Therapy). Here are some of our team’s favorite resources chock full of visual motor integration activities.

The OT Toolbox

The OT Toolbox, a go-to resource for occupational therapists, features an extensive list of visual motor integration activities broken down by topic, like eye-hand coordination, visual scanning, figure ground, visual closure, visual discrimination and more. Examples include:

• Tracing letters with chalk and rainbow writing – Create a box for the child to form the letter in, give verbal clues. Activity helps with planning, dexterity, and hand-eye coordination.
• Sight word sensory bin – Put large printed sight words into a box of shredded paper. The child pulls out sight words, sorting them from the shredded paper and makes sentences by organizing the words.
• Figure ground sight word hunt – Hide printed sight words in a room or in nature and have students look for the words. This helps them discriminate the word from a background.

Your Therapy Source

Your Therapy Source has free and paid resources for OTs and has a page with 10 free worksheets to print and play. The activities include:

• Visual-motor exercise – Downloadable maze with directions for kids to complete
• Visual-motor workbook – 2 free pages from their complete Visual Motor Workbook
• Follow the path – Dot to dot diagrams to practice visual motor and visual-spatial skills

OT Closet

OT Closet has a 5-minute YouTube video demonstrating 8 fun games with a ball for fine motor and visual skills. This video can be shown directly to a student to run through the exercises or can be used to instruct the OT. Activities include:

• Transferring ball from cup to cup
• Building bridge with cups and pencil and rolling bridge under it
• Bowling to knock the cups down using the ball

Visual Motor Integration Goals

When writing visual motor integration IEP goals, there are a few things to remember:

1. It’s critical to write the best possible goals for your students. Researchers have found that “poorly written IEP goals are negatively related to growth and progress in the curriculum” (ASHA).
2. Strive to write SMART goals. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Limited. Using the SMART acronym can help you write much more effective goals. See our resource on writing SMART goals for more.
3. Use a template for writing IEP goals, like this one: By [date] in order to [educational/OT need], student will [functional skill] with [measurement] with [level of assistance], as measured by [person]. For example, by October 2023, in order to legibly complete classroom writing tasks, student will self-generate two sentences with 75% legibility with adapted tools as needed for 3 out of 5 opportunities as measured by teacher and OT.

Visual Motor Developmental Milestones

CHOC Children’s has a chart adapted from the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales‐ 2nd edition and Occupational Therapy for Children‐ 3rd edition OTs can use as a rough guideline for visual motor development.

Thanks for reading our resource on visual motor skills for school-based OTs! We hope you find it a useful addition to your OT toolkit!

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