Packet #45

Primarily, this task exercises your client’s sustained attention and concentration skills. Attention is the essence of focus. Your client will need to focus on looking for a specific target and ignore other visual information that could distract them.

Can you scan a space for relevant information? Using visual scanning and verbal memory, look at a matrix of random letters to find a hidden word pertaining to a theme. This can be done timed or untimed.

Switching between tasks is a very important skill to have. In the real-world, we switch between tasks when we are conversing with friends and participating in an activity. In this exercise, your client will have to correctly switch between numbers and letters or letters and words in either ascending or descending order. Your client must develop strategies to remember the order in which to sequence the items while remembering which items they have already sequenced and avoiding the accidental mispairing of items.

Like a crossword puzzle, this exercise trains planning, working memory, and organization. Using the subtle clues of how many letters are in a word, what words are available, and what words share common characteristics, clients will be challenged to effectively plan and reason in order to correctly place the words in the correct order. If your client requires multiple attempts to solve the puzzle, you may want to assist them in developing effective planning strategies.