Visual Discrimination Worksheets – 9 Free Printables!

Why Is Visual Discrimination Important?

But you might be wondering, what is visual discrimination exactly? Visual discrimination is an important pre-reading skill that must be developed early in a child’s life.

Visual discrimination is all about noticing the details in what we see! Basically, children must train their eyes to notice differences and similarities between the things they see.

This skill will eventually be transferred to reading when kids have to notice the difference between similar looking letters (like b and d) and words (like the and they). It also helps children when it comes to writing and proper letter formation.

Research shows that children with strong visual discrimination skills have greater success in reading and writing! That’s why we want to help children practice visual discrimination, through visual discrimination activities and worksheets designed to target that skill.

As a reading teacher, I talk about visual discrimination a lot. I’ve been working with my first graders work on CH digraphs, and as they practice differentiating between CH and SH, they’re using auditory discrimination and visual discrimination.

✍️ The Worksheets

5 Scan Sheets

Each worksheet is designed for students to carefully discern the correct letter among many similar looking letters.

Letter reversals are very common, so this exercise will help students practice finding the most commonly confused lowercase letters. There is one worksheet for each letter:

• Lowercase a
• Lowercase b
• Lowercase d
• Lowercase p
• Lowercase q

Tip: Place the scan sheets in a plastic folder and use dry erase markers! This makes erasing mistakes easy for students and saves on paper!

4 Multi-Sensory Activity Sheets

Find the Match: Kids must find the only exact match to each picture, following each row and searching among similar looking pictures.

What’s Missing? Looking at two groups of many images, they must find the missing items in the second group. When there’s a lot to look at, it’s easy to miss the differences, so this really tests their skills!

Shape Sort: Kids must transfer their understanding of shapes (made up of lines, slopes, and curves) to real-life objects. They’ll do this by cutting and sorting the pictures of items and pasting them under the correct category of shapes.

Mini Puzzles: Cut out each picture inside a square. Then cut out the top, right-hand corner of each picture. Mix up the pictures and find the one matching piece to each picture. This is a simple activity but it forces students to rely on the content of the pictures rather than the shapes of puzzle pieces (since they’re all the same shape).

Educational Focus

👉 These worksheets are designed for Pre-K, Kindergarten, and First Grade age children.

Remember, just as children have to practice to develop fine and gross motor skills, they also have to practice to develop the muscles in their eyes.

Training the eyes to notice details is what visual discrimination is all about! Children should practice noticing differences, similarities, and details between like things.