Billy Goats Gruff Visual Discrimination Game

This Three Billy Goats Gruff game will help your students learn and practice visual discrimination skills.

Visual discrimination is a very important skill for pre-readers to learn, and is a skill often forgotten in preschool and kindergarten classrooms. Visual discrimination helps children distinguish between things that look similar, such as certain letters, numbers, and shapes.

Before children can read and write words, they must be able to discriminate between letters that look similar. Examples are the letters b, d, p, q. Other letters that could be confused are W and M. The numbers 6 and 9, 3 and 8, 1 and 7, 2 and 5, could easily be confused as well.

In this Three Billy Goats Gruff Game, children will look at the pictures on each page and determine what’s different between the two pictures. You could display these pages on the computer projector if you want to do them as a whole group lesson (which would be a great way to introduce it). Or, print the cards to use as a small group or center activity.

Example cards:

On the card above, children would look at the two pictures (top and bottom), to see what is different about the pictures. The bottom picture has a bush on the left side that is not in the top picture. When preparing this set, I would not cut the cards apart on the line — I keep them together so that children can compare the top and bottom pictures.