Look!

When a person does not have good control of their eye movements they often do not trust, value, or rely on the visual system as a means of gathering information. The other day I was working with a nine year old boy in a vision therapy session. I had made a "map" on the floor using a length of clothesline placed so that every few feet the rope made a 90 degree turn. The boy, who is 100% accurate about identifying left and right on himself, was told to walk along the rope, stop before making a turn and say which way the rope led. If he correctly identified "left" or "right" I allowed him to progress. He was inconsistent and as I watched, I noticed that he never looked at the rope. At least guessing gave him a 50% chance! I began to say, "look DOWN at the rope." When he did, his accuracy rate improved. After more than 30 turns (we repeated the activity a few times), I still needed to cue him to "look DOWN at the rope" .... This boy cannot follow a slowly moving target like a Wolf Want nor can he successfully make short hops between two stationary targets without his eyes shifting suddenly away from where he is trying to make them point. Yet! Even though each week he has better control but now I realize that in addition to building the muscle awareness and automatic control of his eye movements, for this boy, I have to help him gain an appreciation and the habit of letting his eyes participate in gathering the information needed to navigate through life and the world.

Miss Mary Mack.....

Remember the clapping games from elementary school recess? You had to clap a partner's hands in rhythm to the poem following a pattern. You had to cross the midline, remember the words to the rhyme, think ahead and respond to your partner. This little game builds bilateral coordination, laterality & directionality, visual motor integration, all of which are visual skills that contribute to a child's ability to succeed in school. If your child can't do a simple game of patti-cake without mixing up which hand goes where in the rhyme, don't allow them to forget about the game. Slow it down. Do it again and again. Simplify it by using just one or two elements in the sequence until they are mastered. This kind of game is really important especially if your child has trouble with reversals when reading and writing or gets confused about which side of the page to read first.

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.

Can't cross the midline - Rake my yard, please!

Children who cannot cross the midline have lots of problems in school. They don't easily form letters like X, V, W, M, N, or Z because these letters require them to draw a line that moves across a diagonal. These kids have trouble finishing worksheets where they have to connect a selection on the left side of the page by drawing a line to its match on the right side even when they can demonstrate mastery of the information orally or in other kinds of written assessments. Regular playground activities like skipping are also very difficult and the most delayed children may not be able to alternate their feet when climbing up or down a flight of stairs. These same children probably do not know their left from their right and may become confused about which side of a word or line of text to read first. By providing lots of gross motor experiences that require a child to cross their physical midline during a program of in-office vision therapy, we can often help them to form the neural pathways that allow them to understand where they are in space. Then we can assist them to apply that knowledge to directions outside of their body. So, it's fall. I spent much of the afternoon raking leaves. It is a perfect chore to give to a child who needs to learn to cross the midline. You hold the rake with both hands and sweep it across your body again and again. Of course, the satisfaction of creating a huge pile of crispy leaves to jump in and hide beneath provides most of the motivation needed. Even very small children can rake if you buy them rakes with shorter handles.

If you suspect that your child may have delays in the development of laterality & directionality, make an appointment for a comprehensive eye exam with a developmental optometrist who incorporated vision therapy into the practice. The doctor may decide to administer a series of normed tests to learn whether your child's visual perceptual skills are developing on schedule.

If you would like to have a set of original activities that assist children to grow in the development of the visual spatial skills of laterality & directionality, consider buying the Yellow Book of the Eye Can Too! Read e-book series by Lesley Barker

Does Your Child Say Reading is Confusing?

Many children with learning related visual challenges describe reading as being confusing. I notice this time and again when working with younger elementary school students with whom I am doing in-office vision therapy. They don't understand how to explain the trouble using other words, perhaps because for them, reading has always been difficult. How inexplicable to be otherwise intelligent, curious, articulate, and wanting to learn but to lag seriously behind their peers in reading! While I have done no statistical survey to correlate the visual diagnoses of these children with their perception of "confusion", my sense is that it most often accompanies a severe delay in the development of the visual spatial skills of laterality & directionality. These children typically make frequent reversals when reading and writing, don't know their left from their right, and often have trouble crossing the mid-line. My theory is that they don't know which side of the page or word to read first - varying their approach without noticing it from line to line or word to word. Children also use the label, "confusing," when the words appear to wiggle or double on a page. This is a classic symptom of an eye teaming insufficiency or excess. Tutoring in phonics or reading comprehension strategies won't solve these problems. A comprehensive eye exam from a developmental optometrist may identify the problem. Once a diagnosis is in place, the options for treatment can be evaluated.

Does Your Child Stand With One Leg or Arm Wrapped Around the Other?

Many of the children whom I see for in-office vision therapy have more than one learning-related visual issue that makes it difficult for them to succeed in school. Sometimes a child presents with a severe laterality and directionality delay. Laterality is the ability to tell left and right accurately on yourself. Directionality is the ability to project the knowledge about left and right away from yourself into space. Both are visual spatial skills, i.e. processing skills or visual perceptual skills. We discover the extent of a child's delays using a combination of tests: the Piaget Test of Left/Right Awareness, either the Jordan or the Gardner test of letter reversals, and a dyslexia screener. Children who cannot cross the mid-line or who make frequent reversals when reading or writing letters and numbers often score poorly on these tests, all of which have age/grade level expected normed scores. Then we use a series of activities in therapy to address any laterality and directionality delays. (The Yellow Book in the Eye Can Too! Read series provides parents and teachers with similar activities and information about how to understand a child's behavior when doing them.) I have recently noticed that many of the children with the most severely delayed laterality and directionality skills stand or sit with one leg wrapped around the other. They often twist their bodies when standing, and seem to be holding themselves together with the right hand grabbing their left side and the left hand grabbing their right side. I think that this postural habit exacerbates the problem by making it difficult for the child to know which body parts belong to the right side and which to the left. I have begun to coach parents to discourage their children from using these positions as another way to address the child's visual spatial problems which they sometimes express as being "confusing." I'd love to know whether others see the same correlations. Feel free to add your comments. Thanks.

Does your student make frequent reversals when reading or writing? Here's help!

If your student makes frequent reversals when reading or writing or gets confused about left and right, the second book, The Yellow Book, in my three book series: Eye Can Too! Read ...Better, Faster, Without Making Reversals or Getting Confused may help. These behaviors are often due to a delay in a student's development of the visual spatial skills of laterality and directionality. Sometimes students who make frequent reversals when reading or writing are labeled dyslexic even though there is no consensus among the various disciplines on a definition for dyslexia. However, many of these students who receive vision therapy designed to address the visual spatial developmental issues overcome them. They often make significant gains in their academic performance as a result. The Yellow Book contains a series of activities like the ones we use in the vision therapy context which are designed to help students improve both of these visual spatial skills. Created with home-school families in mind, each activity identifies the visual skills used, the academic objectives and appropriate grade or ability level, a list of materials needed, clear instructions, and a set of observation guidelines to help you to understand what your student's performance may indicate. The book is available at http://www.home-school-inc.com/store/p-15-item-000014.aspx as a pdf download or as a printed spiral bound text. The Purple Book (the first in the series) is also available online at Home School Inc- it gives similar activities designed to help students improve the eye movement skills that must be in place for a student to be able to read efficiently without skipping words, lines, or losing their place. In a few weeks, the third book in the series, The Green Book, will also be available. That book provides academic activities designed to improve a student's visual perceptual skills. Each book contains graded activities for Pre-K through 8th graders. While they are all written for a home school audience, classroom teachers will find the activities easy to adapt for their class either as whole group or learning center activities.

K-12 Learning Center Activity - BDPQ Jumps

Learning to tell left from right on yourself is the visual spatial skill of laterality. Extending it into space is the visual spatial skill of directionality. Both are developmental skills that impact a student's ability to learn to read, write, and do gross motor activities. Here is an activity that is similar to one we use in the vision therapy context to assist patients to develop laterality & directionality. It is meant to be used as a K-2 Learning Center Activity.

Title: BDPQ Jumps

Learning-Related Visual Skills: This activity uses the visual spatial skills of laterality and directionality as well as saccadic eye movements, the small hops the eyes must make to go accurately from the end of one word or line of text to the next.

Academic Objective: This activity gives students practice reading and naming lower case b, d, p, and q.

Preparation: Create a chart with 5 rows and 5 columns. Do not put the gridlines in. Randomly arrange b, d, p, and q so that there are five letters on each line. A text size of 42 will be readable at 5-7 feet for most students. Post the chart on a bulletin board. On the floor in front of the bulletin board, use colored masking tape to create a pair of intersecting perpendicular lines 4 feet x 4 feet.

Directions: Show the students that the vertical tape line is analogous to the stick of each letter while the space left by the intersection is analogous to the letter's circle. So, the lower right space is B; the upper right space is P; the lower left space is D; and the upper left space is Q. Students are to work as pairs to jump into the space that matches the letter on the chart which they must read from left to right and from top to bottom as usual. The jumper must also say the name of the letter correctly. Partners observe each other while keeping track of where the jumper is on the chart and watching for mistakes. If a jumper makes 3 mistakes before finishing the entire chart, the roles change. The observer becomes the jumper. How many turns does it take for each partner to jump through the chart making fewer than 3 mistakes? Set a time limit of 10 minutes for each partnership to remain at this learning station.

Colored Dot Touch: An Eye Can Too! Read Learning Center Activity for K-12 Classrooms

About 20% of the students in any single classroom have some form of learning-related visual problem. This includes students whose visual issues are obvious because they need glasses, have eye turns, amblyopia, or conditions that result in low vision as well as students whose visual challenges are masked by poor academic performance, poor behavior, and frequent headaches. One way for a classroom teacher to identify when a student would benefit from a comprehensive vision exam by a developmental optometrist whose practice includes vision therapy is to incorporate learning-related visual challenges in their math and literacy learning centers.

Colored Dot Touch is a simple learning center activity for grades K-2.

Learning Related Visual Skills: Laterality & Directionality, visual-motor-integration, and saccadic eye movements

Academic Objective: Students will have independent practice recognizing and naming colors. They will also gain experience observing their partner and recording data using tally marks. The follow-up group activity gives the class an introduction to creating a simple bar graph.

Materials Needed:

• 1 sheet white poster board
• 1 package 1 inch diameter colored dot stickers (at least 4 different colors)
• tape or thumb tacks
• eye patch for each student (make pirate patches as an art project using construction paper and elastic)

Preparation:

1. Place the poster board in a landscape orientation so that the top edge is wider than the right/left margin edge
2. Stick 10 dots in a column starting about 2 inches from the top and 2 inches from the right side of the board. Vary the colors randomly.
3. Stick another 10 dots in a parallel column starting 2 inches from the top and 2 inches from the left side of the board. Line up the dots so that they are spaced evenly as though one dot from each column was in the same horizontal row.
4. Create student score sheets. There should be space on the sheet for the names and scores of two students who each get two turns doing the activity.
5. Mount the board on a bulletin board in the classroom so that it is easy to reach when the students are standing

Directions:

• Write the names of both partners on the score sheet
• The first partner should stand about a foot away from the board, wearing the eye patch over one eye.
• Using her right hand, she should touch the top dot in the left column and say the color. Then she should use her left hand to touch the top dot in the right column and say its color. Alternating hands, she should proceed down the chart without skipping any of the dots.
• Her partner should observe and count the number of dots she missed as well as the number of times she forgot to switch hands. Record these numbers on the score sheet. Make sure that the score sheet has a place to record each student's performance using the right eye and another place to record the performance using the left eye.
• Switch roles. The recorder should put on an eye patch and do the activity while his partner observes and reports his results.
• Continue switching roles until both partners have done the activity with each eye.

Group Activity Follow-up:

• Create a bar graph to display the results.
• First, compile the results of all the students when they were doing the activity with the each eye. Sort the results according to gender.
• Count the number of times that girls and boys forgot to switch their hands.
• Place the range of the scores along the y-axis.
• Make one colored bar for the boys and another colored bar for the girls. Along the x-axis of the graph, write the labels: "Right Eye", "Left Eye", and "Switching Hands". So, each label should designate a section of the graph that has two bars.

What do the results tell you about your students' learning-related visual skills?

• Students who easily performed this activity probably have good visual-motor-integration, good saccadic eye movements, and a good understanding of laterality & directionality. They probably read easily without losing their place, skipping words or lines, or getting tired. These students are the ones who probably rarely, if ever, make reversals when reading or writing. Most likely they finish worksheets quickly and work in an organized fashion from left to right on the page and from the top to the bottom.
• Students who missed a couple of dots or who neglected to switch their hands once or twice during the activity may demonstrate average performance on paper and pencil tasks or when reading. They could likely improve their efficiency on academic activities by being given more opportunities to exercise their saccadic eye muscles.
• Students who became frustrated and could not complete the activity may have severe deficits of their saccadic eye movements. They probably struggle to learn to read, losing their place frequently and turning in worksheets that look full of holes because of the erratic way that they proceed through the rows and columns. If they were unable to switch hands between columns or if they could not remember to cross the midline to touch the dots on the opposite side of the board, suspect delays in the development of laterality & directionality. They may make frequent reversals when reading and writing. They may express their frustration as confusion. These students would benefit from a comprehensive eye exam.
• Students whose performance on the activity with one eye was weaker than when they did it with the other eye may have a lazy eye, an eye turn, or a difference in the acuities of the eyes that has been undetected so far. These students may need glasses and should be seen by an optometrist or other eye doctor.

Are you a classroom teacher or a home-school teacher/parent? After you try this activity in your classroom, post a comment about your experiences. From time to time, I'll post more learning center activities that rely on learning-related visual skills. I'd like to gather your opinions about them. Thanks in advance.

c. 2009 by Lesley Barker

Why Is Left/Right Awareness Important to Reading?

Since we read from left to right and from the top of the page down, beginning readers who do not know their left and right may experience some confusion. We call the ability to tell left and right on ourself the visual spatial skill of laterality. Laterality is usually developed, according to Piaget's observations, by the time a child is 7 years old. Projecting that knowledge away from ourself into space is the visual spatial skill of directionality. This involves layers of developmental understanding that evolve in most children by the time they are 11.

Children who have delays in the skills of laterality and directionality mix up their left and right. They often have poor bilateral integration. In other words, they tend not to use both hands or feet efficiently to do tasks like cutting, eating, and alternating their feet going up and down stairs. They probably also have difficulty crossing the midline. By this I mean the physical midline, the ocular midline, and the midline on a page of text or on a worksheet.

So, these children will become frustrated by assignments that involve drawing lines to match information arranged in a column on the left side of the worksheet with additional information arranged in a column on the right side of the worksheet. They may know the correct answer but be unable to connect the lines. They may exhibit poor manuscript handwriting- especially when forming letters and numbers which cross the midline like x, y, M, N, s, v, and w.

Sometimes these children make frequent reversals when reading and writing and the children who are the most developmentally delayed in laterality and directionality may mirror write. They are often labeled dyslexic, a condition that has many competing definitions and involves both visual and auditory perception and processing.

It is possible to build a child's developmental skills of laterality and directionality and to increase their left/right awareness. In fact, occupational therapists and vision therapists spend a lot of time in therapy doing just that for our patients. There are normed tests available to measure a student's development in laterality and directionality that are incorporated in the developmental assessment of a child's visual perceptual skills given by developmental optometrists and by educational psychologists.

I believe that one easy to achieve educational goal should be to provide activities in laterality and directionality for every primary student before they fall behind in reading and writing. This can be done via learning center activities in the classroom. To that end, the second book, the "Yellow Book", in the Eye Can Too! Read series, published by Home School Incorporated, (available in the next few weeks on their website) provides an assortment of activities that home-school families and classroom teachers can use. There are clear directions followed by questions to inform your observation of your student as they do the activities.

This blog is intended to give information for parents and teachers about learning-related visual skills. I encourage each reader to become a follower of this blog and also to become a fan of the Eye Can Too! Read FaceBook page. Please use the wall on the FaceBook page to ask your questions about vision and learning. That will help me to select topics for this blog. Thanks.