Are you planning a five senses theme for your preschoolers? These hands-on sense of sight activities are a fun way to help children explore colour, light, shapes and visual perception across several areas of the preschool curriculum.
You’ll find ideas for:
- Visual exploration and science
- Visual perception and games
- Literacy and language
- Art and creative activities
Here are 14 simple sense of sight activities to add to your lesson plans, or to try at home with your preschooler.
Visual Exploration & Science
Explore how our eyes work and investigate colour, light, detail and distance.
Sight Station
Set up a sight station with tools that allow children to explore how things can look different, such as magnifying glasses, binoculars, prisms, kaleidoscopes or child-safe microscopes.
Let children experiment freely with the different tools and talk about what they notice. Do objects appear bigger, closer, more colourful or more detailed?
Colour Hunt
Give each child or group a colour and challenge them to find objects of that colour around the classroom or outdoors.
Gather the objects together and compare the different shades. Which are lighter or darker? Are any of the colours almost the same?
Children can also sort the objects from lightest to darkest.
Light & Shadow Exploration
Use torches or flashlights to shine light onto different objects and create shadows on a wall or floor.
Move the light closer to and farther away from the objects and watch how the shadows change. Do they become bigger or smaller? What happens when you move the light to a different position?
Let children experiment with making shadows using toys, classroom objects or their hands.
Magnifying Glass Nature Hunt
Take magnifying glasses outdoors and examine natural objects such as leaves, bark, flowers, stones and soil. Look closely for tiny details, patterns, colours and textures that are difficult to see with the naked eye.
Encourage children to share or draw some of the interesting details they discover.
Visual Perception & Games
Build visual attention, discrimination and memory through simple games.
Visual Memory
Build visual memory by showing children a selection of small objects on a tray and then covering them. Challenge kids to name as many of the objects as possible.
Discuss why some objects were easier to remember than others.
Possibilities include colour/brightness, familiar/favourite object or comparative size.
What’s Missing?
This is another simple variation of the previous game, that will build attention and visual memory.
Place five objects on a tray and ask the children to look at them carefully. Then, cover the items, remove one and ask them to identify which is missing.
I Spy
Play a game of I Spy by choosing an object that everyone can see and giving a visual clue:
“I spy with my little eye something that is…”
Use clues based on colour, shape, size, position or initial sounds, and have children look carefully around them to guess the object.
Take turns choosing objects and giving clues.
Find the Differences
Give children two similar pictures with a few small differences between them. Have them look carefully and find what has changed.
Alternatively, provide pairs of matching pictures or objects and challenge children to find the ones that are exactly the same.
Talk about the visual details they used to tell them apart, such as colour, shape, size or position.
Literacy & Language
Explore sight and visual perception through stories, discussion and descriptive language.
Arlo Needs Glasses
Arlo Needs Glasses by Barney Saltzberg is an interactive picture book that introduces the practical topics of eye checkups and getting glasses to help with sight when needed.
Children who wear glasses can share their experiences. Other children can name friends or family members who wear glasses.
Watch the read-aloud below.
It Looked Like Spilt Milk
Read It Looked Like Spilt Milk by Charles G. Shaw, a repetitive picture book that encourages children to look closely at different shapes and use their imaginations to decide what they resemble.
Encourage children to share what they see in each shape. Afterwards, extend the story with the cloud-themed art and observation activities below.
The Pirate of Kindergarten
Read The Pirate of Kindergarten by George Ella Lyon, a story about a young girl who experiences double vision and wears an eye patch to help her see.
Use the story to talk about how people can experience sight differently and why some children may need glasses, eye patches or other help with their vision.
You can also watch the read-aloud version below.
Art & Creative Activities
Explore colour, shape and visual perception through creative activities.
Cloud Painting
After reading It Looked Like Spilt Milk, head outdoors and watch the clouds go by. Encourage children to look carefully at their shapes and use their imaginations to see familiar objects, animals or pictures in the clouds.
Then, provide blue cardstock, white paint and thick paintbrushes, and invite children to paint some of the cloud shapes or pictures they imagined.
Make a Class Cloud Book
Extend the It Looked Like Spilt Milk activity by having children create their own pages for a class book.
Let them cut or tear white paper into interesting shapes, decide what their shapes look like and glue them onto blue paper.
Add each child’s words following the pattern of the story, then compile the pages into a class cloud book to read together.
Colour Mixing
Offer children paint in the primary colours and encourage them to paint freely, mixing some of the colours together to watch the secondary colours emerge.
You could also offer white and black paint and experiment with making colours lighter or darker, such as mixing red and white to make pink.
Here are more colour-mixing activities if you’d like to dive deeper into this
I hope you’ll enjoy trying these ‘sense of sight’ activities. Explore more senses with these ideas: