Improving your child’s vision is an important part of their development. The CDC reports that 6.8% of children under eighteen have diagnosed eye and vision conditions. Helping them see and learn different objects, shapes, words, and colors can be a lot to handle. So why not make it fun? Here are 5 fun games and exercises to improve your child’s eye health for the new school year!

What Did I Add Drawing?

For this exercise you just need a pencil and a piece of paper! What Did I Add Drawing? is a visual game where you and your child start out by drawing a simple picture. Could be a specific shape like a circle or square, or you can start to draw an object like an umbrella or a sun. While one person is drawing, the other closes their eyes. Once they are done, then the next person goes and adds their own drawing to the picture. At first it’s easy, but once you start adding more to the picture, the 1^st person has to find what was drawn by the 2^nd person and vice versa. You can adjust the level by making new additions easy or harder to find within the drawing, but this is a great way to assess your child’s vision and memory level!

Stare!

A fun game for the whole family, Stare! helps take game night to the next level! It’s an image card game that tests your child’s visual and memory skills. Players have 30 seconds to stare at an image on a card --it might be an illustration, funny photo, comic, animation, etc. When the time is up, an opponent will flip over the card and ask the player a series of questions about the image to see how much they can recall. What color were the balloons? How many people were sitting at the table? What was the person on the right holding in their hand? If they guess correctly, they can advance on the board game until a winner is crowned!

Want to win your own Stare! board game? We’re giving one away on our Instagram page in celebration of Children’s Vision and Learning Month – follow us @solsticeinsurance to see how you can be the lucky winner!

Visual Brainstormers

Get ready – Visual Brainstormers is filled with puzzles, brainteasers, word games, and more! A deck of 100 cards filled with fun, vibrant illustrations and visual components, put you and your child’s mental and visual skills to the test by enhancing your critical thinking skills with this card game. Each card has a question with the answers and a bonus on the back, they are also color-coded to let you know if the topic is easy or hard!

Blink

Played at lightning speed, Blink is a card matching game! The rules are to match the color, shape, or number of shapes on the card before your opponent does. As you start the game, you deal half the deck of cards to you and your opponent (or split it evenly amongst the number of players). Once you have your cards, you put out one card from your pile to the discard pile and take 3 new cards into your hand. The objective is to get rid of your big pile before your opponent does by matching your cards correctly! Blink is great for building you and your child’s visual perception and quick-thinking skills.

SET

This fast-paced card game is great to whip out when you have a few hours to spare or bring on the road. SET is a visual perception game that anyone can play! The objective of the game is to make a set of 3 cards from 12 cards placed in front of you. Now in this game, the cards come in all different shapes, sizes, colors, and shades. To make a set you have to find 3 cards that have all of the same features or all different features. To learn more on how to play the game, check out this video! This game tests your and your child’s visual perception skills by seeing how many sets you can see and create from the pile in front of you. After you watch the video, you’ll see the sets do not appear as easy or as simple as you might think!

These are just five of the many games you can play with your child to help them improve their eyesight. It’s important to get your child’s eyes checked regularly and to look out for any symptoms that might be caused by vision issues. But before you go in for the next back to school vision checkup, try a fun vision test at home to get your child ready for the optometrist! Download our FREE at-home vision test below to help you decide!