Spotting careless mistakes in your child’s work is a common but frustrating occurrence for many parents, especially if these mistakes cost marks in an important assignment or during the examinations.

And I’m sure many parents have well-intentionally reminded their children to “Be more careful with your work” or “Remember to double-check after you finish” And yet, these reminders do not seem to work much effect.

Well, besides reminders and patience, we can adopt a more ACTIVE approach to nip this issue in the bud and empower the child to build the ability and keen-ness towards details and ‘subtle’ differences in his/her work.

The ability to observe and see details is a learning skill known as Visual Discrimination. And in school, children need to tap into this skill on a daily basis such as when they are reading words, copying from the board or learning spelling.

Using a simple passage to illustrate the use of Visual Discrimination:

Today, our teacher brought us to the dairy farm to see how cows are milked. I was really scared of the cows but my teacher told us cows are sacred animals in India. I’m going to write about the visit in my diary tonight.

**What can you notice about the words highlighted in red?
(Answer: same letters, different order)

And, how about Visual Discrimination for the following Chinese words?

大    太    犬

待    持    诗

** Again, words written with almost the same strokes but just in different positions or different sides

Now, take a moment to think about how many such similarly-looking words a child would encounter over the course of his/her learning; and it would not be hard to imagine the immense amount of visual information (shapes, words, numbers, sentences) a child needs to discriminate on a daily basis.

To find out about your child’s Visual Discrimination ability, REGISTER for our Complimentary Learning Assessment.

Article contributed by ThinkersBox