Reading & Learning
Vision Skills That Are Necessary For Reading
Eye Tracking: If your eyes don’t track accurately, the information on the page will get mixed up. When it’s bad enough, a child may not even recognize the same word three lines later.
Eye Teaming: For focus and attention, your eyes need to work together efficiently. Problems like convergence insufficiency can cause headaches, migraines, difficulty with computer screens and more.
Accommodation: Your brain controls how accurately your eyes focus on the page. Problems with accommodation can cause blurry vision, headaches, difficulty with concentration and more.
Visual Processing: Your brain needs to accurately decode your vision. This includes things like visual memory for spelling and directionality for understanding letter reversals.
Vision Problems Can Look Like:
Dyslexia:
If the information does not make it accurately from the page to the brain, it will cause problems in learning the written language. Too often testing assumes that vision is working properly, and diagnoses a problem higher up the chain.
Attention Deficit Disorder:
Children with ADHD who also had eye teaming problems were found to score lower on the ADHD testing once the eye teaming problems were treated. 7 of the 9 symptoms are the same,
Learning Disabilities:
If the brain doesn’t take in or process vision accurately, it can cause difficulties in learning that range from mild to severe. In the process of diagnosing a learning disability, these visual functions are often overlooked.
Developmental Coordination Disorder:
Developing accurate coordination requires accurate coordinates. If you didn’t know where to go on a map, it would be hard to get there.
What Needs To Be Tested If Your Child Is Struggling
Eye Tracking: If your child cannot accurately move their eyes through the text, they won’t get the right information from the page.
Eye Teaming: Your child’s eyes need to be able to work together. Problems with how the eyes work together (binocular dysfunction) can cause problems with reading and attention.
Eye Focusing: Your child’s eyes need to be able to focus and hold the focus on the page, as well as easily shift back and forth from the page to the board.
Visual Processing: Problems with visual processing can lead to letter reversals such as ‘b’ and ‘d’, as well as trouble with writing, spelling and more.
