Early on our CVI journey, we realised that Eva thoroughly enjoyed and used her vision the most when matching cards. Even the most intricately designed cards were of interest and she matching those tricky ones quite well. Whilst at Office Works several months ago I came across this fantastic game for her to work on her shape matching skills:

The Bingo game is pretty self-explanatory and even great for your kiddos that have no visual issues, my 4 year old son loves playing this came with his sister.

There are 4 mats to choose from with shapes in a variety of colours and sizes. We have chosen to start with simply matching the shape and will shortly work towards ensuring she has the right size (there is some success already with matching same size shape) and shape is in the right direction as the one on the mat (take a look at the image above to see the triangles on the mat in different directions). The player chooses a card (placed upside down) from the pile and then see if the corresponding shape is on the mat.

There is a 5th mat for the player to put together an image of an octopus however we are yet to master puzzles.

This is such a simple game to play and tweak to suit your child’s abilities. If your kiddo is finding it difficult due to complexity, then you can grab a piece of black card and cut out holes that correspond to each of the 4 holds in the grid. I love that this game can easily be purchased from a local store rather than scouring websites, and that it can be adjusted for at least one CVI phase.

Office works have a range of other Bingo games that we have purchased but yet to use – take a look at these here.

Other great ways to encourage using vision if shape is no interest is using their favorite characters. Eva loves ‘Peppa Pig’ and ‘Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom’ so we have played matching games with great success (she probably finds it more exciting with these cards too!) You can find the cards here for Peppa Pig and Ben & Holly. The Peppa and B&H cards I have, have simple backgrounds which is the best way to use for our CVI kiddos, but once your kiddo can deal with complexity it’s a great idea to try and get cards with coloured backgrounds for more of a challenge.

I would love to hear how you have used matching to help our CVI kiddo, and any other fun games that vision is incorporated into.