What's So Good About Recess?

Recess, that endangered but kid's favorite part of the school day, could be key to a child's academic success. No, not because they need a break - but they do! And, not because it's fun - but it is! Recess is where the gross motor bilateral coordination building laterality & directionality eye movement visual perceptual and visual motor integration skills all get exercised on a daily basis without anyone realizing it. That's the problem. So many educators insist that the reason children are not making more consistent progress learning to read and write is because they don't spend enough time in the classroom that many (especially inner city) schools are doing away with recess. My next Eye Can Too! Read book will be about recess games that actually will make it easier for children to learn to read. These include hopscotch, jump rope, ball games, aiming/tossing games, running games, and clapping games. I'm going to provide the directions and then explain the learning-related visual skills involved as well as connect those to how they are critical to developing adequate reading and math skills. Want to help? Add a comment here or on FaceBook or Twitter about your favorite recess game when you were a kid. If there was a type of recess game that you just never were able to do well, let us know that also. And, more than anything, make sure that the children you know, love, and work with have plenty of opportunity to be outside playing the games that build the skills they need in the classroom.

Eye Movements & a Struggling Adult Reader Who Has an MBA

I recently did a very simple eye movement activity with a friend who reads very slowly. It has always been a problem for her from the time she was in elementary school. In fact, she chose her high school and college courses to avoid reading so she became good at math and ended up with an MBA in finance. It remains agonizingly difficult for her to find the energy to tackle reading even a few pages. When she reads aloud, she lacks fluency, obviously struggling to keep her place while decoding the words and trying to process their meaning. So, I suggested that she might have some basic eye movement deficits. Now, I am not an eye doctor. Nor do I play one on TV but I am a skilled observer of a person's eye movements because of the work I do as a vision therapist. I asked my friend to cover one eye and to follow my pen as it moved in a slow arc in front of her eyes, up, down, across, and circling in toward her face. Then she covered the other eye and we repeated the activity. She had no problem making smooth eye movements to track the moving pen so her ocular pursuits look fine. She could even maintain a conversation while doing this activity. Next, one eye at a time again, I asked my friend to look at one pen and then, on my signal, jump her eye to another. She could not keep her fixation on the first object, nor could she accurately locate the second. When she visits a developmental optometrist for a thorough eye exam, I predict that she will receive a diagnosis of saccadic deficits. This is the result of poor control of the six muscles in each eye and can be addressed through a program of vision therapy. (In fact, just as a side note, the Purple Book of the Eye Can Too! Read series of e-books that I wrote has a lot of activities that rely on and can improve these eye movement skills). Next I asked my friend to use two eyes and focus on the #2 written on the side of a pencil that I was holding about a yard away from her face so that the eraser was facing up. I asked her to keep the #2 single and clear and to tell me if it got blurry or doubled. Slowly I pushed the pencil towards her face watching her eyes to make sure that they were converging. They did get closer and closer to her nose which is appropriate. However, when the pencil was about a foot away, my friend said, "That hurts!" She did not look away right then but I could see the stress that she was under. I repeated the activity and she repeated her report of discomfort at about the same place. So, when she visits the developmental optometrist she will likely receive another diagnosis related to her eye teaming skills.She should have been able to track that pencil in to three inches or nearer to her nose without pain, blur, or double vision. No wonder reading has been so difficult in spite of her willingness to tolerate significant discomfort in order to succeed. No matter your age, if you have difficulty reading, see whether there is a visual issue that can be resolved with a few eye exercises. Locate a developmental optometrist by going to www.covd.org and plugging in your zip code. Make an appointment and see what the doctor discovers.

Do You Have Good Eye Movement Skills?

A very common learning related visual problem is poor eye movements. The six eye muscles in each eye should work together to point the eye to a visual target such as a word on a page or a baseball coming towards a bat or glove. There are actually two types of eye movements facilitated by these muscles. Pursuits are the movements the eyes make to follow a moving visual target smoothly. When I am helping a patient develop good pursuits, I often characterize this skill as "ice skating for your eyes." The other type of eye movement is called saccades. Saccades are the short hops the eyes make between two fixed visual targets such as when going from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next line.

Both pursuits and saccades are developmental eye movements. Like learning to swim or ride a bicycle, once a person knows how to do them, they continue to improve. With experience, the person can coordinate the movement automatically and fluently enough to do other things at the same time like carry on a conversation, for example. However, for patients whose developmental eye movements are delayed, basic tasks like reading, lining up digits in a math problem, or hitting a baseball can be very difficult.

There is a simple test that optometrists use to test a child's eye movements called the Developmental Eye Movement Test (DEM). It is available exclusively from the Bernell company (www.bernell.com). Bernell provides an assortment of tools for optometrists and vision therapists. The DEM can be used for children as young as first grade. First the child is asked to read a column of 80 single-digit numbers arranged vertically. The examiner times the child with a stop watch. Then the child must read the same 80 numbers arranged in rows horizontally with random gaps in the rows. By the time a child is twelve years old, the speed with which they read the vertical numbers should match their speed reading the horizontal numbers. The test has been validated over a period of years so norms for a child's performance scores have been established according to both age and grade. Besides comparing the vertical and horizontal reading speeds, the DEM also measures the number of errors made by the child. It only takes about three minutes to complete the entire DEM but the results may explain why a child is having difficulty in school in spite of having 20-20 vision.

If your child scores poorly on the DEM, vision therapy may be indicated. Your child may also be helped by the activities in the Purple Book of the Eye Can Too! Read Series. While I wrote the series for home-schooling families, anyone can implement the activities which are similar to what we use in in-office vision therapy to address eye movement deficits.

Eye Hand Coordination as Demonstrated by Kindergarten Students 100 Years Ago

These are three scans taken from kindergarten albums from my family members. The first is carefully woven paper. It was made by Mary Edwards at Froebel Kindergarten in St. Louis City in the 1907-1908 school year. The other two scans were done by a boy, Albert Edwards, who attended kindergarten in the 1899-1900 school year, also in a St. Louis public school. The portrait of George Washington is a printed picture over which Albert has sewn very tiny neat straight stitches - the blue is a coarse thread and the white is a very fine thread. The holes are different sizes denoting that the needles were too. The third scan shows a series of folded origami.


Why did I include these scans in the Eye Can Too! Read blog? I wanted to make a statement about what kinds of activities were done at the reading readiness, preschool level in the eras before television, plastic playgrounds, and Game Boys. The eye-hand coordination required to do any of these crafts is far more mature than we expect from fifth graders today, let alone from five year olds. Not only did these children have to demonstrate very fine motor control, this kind of close work would have strengthened their eye movements so that they could gain experience converging on near point images long before they were expected to use those eye movements to decode the meaning of text.