It's back-to-school time, and your child could be struggling because of one of four vision problems that eye exams often don't pick up.
1. Eye tracking: If the eyes don't track properly through text, how would you expect somebody to read well? Take a look at the video on this page, at 0:21. The reader on the left - as you can see here, eyes don't track properly through the text. She skips lines, loses her place, and mixes up the information. Her reading fluency sounds terrible, while the reader on the right is your average reader. Notice the difference?
2. How the eyes actually work together: On the video at 0:41, you can see here that the two eyes actually do the same thing while they're tracking. On this one, the two eyes don't work together at all. No wonder there's problems! At 0:52 the is an example of a grade-10 girl when she was a C-student, and you can note the eyes not working together. At 0:57, when she's an A-student, you can see that they do work together.
3. Eye focusing: If the eyes don't shift their focus accurately, sustaining attention is much harder and it's even hard to copy off the board.
4. How the brain makes sense of visual information: This has everything to do with the visual memory required for spelling or understanding the difference between the hand motions I make in the video at 1:19, which is at the heart of a lot of letter reversals. So, if your child is struggling in school, even though they may have had an eye exam, please make sure to have their eye tracking, teaming, focusing and the visual processing tested. Find a developmental or neurological optometrist near you. Browse our site for more information.
Happy learning!