Your Child Can't Keep Their Eye on the Ball?

Just because a child has difficulty aiming and catching a ball does not necessarily mean that they are not athletic. It might mean that they need to see a developmental optometrist for a comprehensive eye exam. Children with poor ocular motility skills do not know how to control their eye muscles. The same kids who can't catch may also move their heads from side to side across a page when reading instead of moving just their eyes. This may result in frequent losses of place or skipping little words and lines of text. Why is this? Because each eye is equipped with six muscles that serve to coordinate to physically point the eye towards a visual target when used efficiently. However, children who don't know how to make automatic voluntary eye movements may have difficulty tracking the flight of the ball (and finding their place in a book.) Children can also have a visual-motor mismatch that makes it hard for them to discern where something is in space. This can impair a child's visual-motor integration skills- not just in sports, but in handwriting and other fine motor skills as well. Every child should receive an annual eye exam and if your child exhibits any of these problems, ask about a comprehensive evaluation of their binocular skills when you talk to the doctor. These problems are routinely addressed with just a few weeks of in-office vision therapy.

By the way, the activities in the Purple Book of my Eye Can Too! Read series of e-books all can be used as an addition to a program of in-office vision therapy to improve a child's eye movement skills. Written for homeschooled families, these activities are easy to do and appropriate for elementary school children.

Does your student move their head across the page when reading?

Do you notice that one of your students moves their head across the page when reading? The same student probably also struggles with losing their place, skipping lines and little words, and finishing worksheets arranged in rows and columns. Someone who habitually moves their head when reading may be compensating for inadequately developed eye muscle movement skills. However, this strategy ends up hurting their reading speed, efficiency, accuracy, and comprehension. In fact, they are using their neck muscles to point their eyes to the text when each eye has a total of six muscles specifically designed to work together to make very specific, accurately focused eye movements.

Developmental optometrists whose practices include vision therapy have lots of activities that serve to address poorly developed ocular motilities. They usually start as monocular activities so that the student wears a patch over one eye to do the task, switching the patch to the other eye to repeat it. Once a student demonstrates equivalent accurate and efficient eye movement skills with each eye by itself, the therapy advances to binocular tasks. Not only does each eye need to move appropriately to gather visual information, the eyes together have to coordinate to point at the same time to the same point in space. Otherwise the image will wiggle, appear blurred, or seem to be double.

If you have a student who moves their head back and forth when reading, recommend that they see a developmental optometrist for a comprehensive eye exam. They may have a deficit of their ocular motilities which is easily diagnosed by a Developmental Eye Movement Test (DEM). The earlier in a student's academic career that these deficits are identified and addressed, the better that student will do overall in school.

The Purple Book in my Eye Can Too! Read series provides lots of academic activities for the home school classroom which can also be adapted for the regular classroom. Each activity provides review in language arts or math skills for Pre-K through eighth grade. I also included helpful observation questions to assist the teacher or parent to evaluate a student's performance. The activities in The Purple Book will help you identify if your child's eye movement skills are under-developed. They can also be used even by people who do not have eye movement deficits to increase their reading speed and efficiency.

Does Your Child Look With Her Hands?

When my children were small I used to admonish them to "look with your eyes, not with your hands" especially when we were in little boutiques where everything was fragile. This simple reminder helps patients in the vision therapy clinic as well. Often children who do not know how to control their eye movements efficiently explore everything with touch. The seem unable to find anything -even if it is right in front of them- without groping and feeling the array of items. They seem not to value their eyes as tools to gather information about their world even though there is nothing physically wrong with their eyes at all. Getting these children to use their eyes more readily may involve vision therapy to correct a deficit of ocular motilities but it is also possible that the root issue is one of visual attention. How should you begin to build your child's visual attention? Play "I spy" type games where there is no touch allowed. Use rich visual clues to describe the objects you want the child to get for you. For example say, "Please get the large green vase with the pointy handles that is to the left of the dictionary on the third shelf." Then, resist the child's efforts to get you to answer whether they are hot, cold, or if it is "there". Of course, if your child is four or five years old and still does not seem to rely on his eyes to learn about his environment, consider making an appointment with a developmental optometrist for a complete eye examination. It is recommended, actually, that every child receive an annual eye exam.