Vision-friendly toys and games for the holidays

Speaker: Kellye Knueppel

Kellye Knueppel: Hello, I'm Dr. Kellye Knueppel I'm here to share with you my list of optometrist-approved toys and games. for vision development. My list started many years ago at the request of parents of my vision therapy patients who were looking for Christmas gifts for their children to help supplement the vision therapy program. Many people don't realize that there are many visual skills that are learned and developed such as eye movements, eye focusing, eye teaming, space perception, visual thinking, visual memory, eye-hand coordinations, and all of these things, when they're working well, they are very useful in everyday life. When they're not working well, they can really get in the way for many things, especially eye-hand coordination, things like catching a ball, handwriting and things like reading attention, being able to keep your place when you read and many other things. Vision therapy is a way to help develop those skills. But, in real life, those things are developed using different toys and games that we do very regularly and some toys are made specifically to help develop those skills. My list I've tried to include mostly things that are hand, are hands-on things and not so much— well, we don't have any computer games on our list. So we're looking for things that the child can do by themselves. Or ideally, they can also do with family members and with their parents so that everybody can enjoy developing these skills.