What does a math worksheet tell you about vision?

Many elementary school math worksheets are arranged in rows and columns. The expected approach is for the student to start at the top row with the first problem on the left and work across the row solving each problem in turn until there are no more remaining. Then the student should move onto the first problem at the left side of the second row, continuing in this manner until the last problem, located at the right margin of the bottom row, has been solved. Then, the paper is ready to be checked, corrected as needed, and handed in to the teacher. If, however, the teacher receives a paper that has a haphazard amount of problems solved and the student asserts that they, indeed, have been careful to do each problem, you can predict that the student may need to have an extensive eye examination by an eye doctor who is skilled in evaluating binocular vision development in children. A haphazard approach to this kind of worksheet is consistent with a saccadic deficit, a condition that relates to the child's ability to control their eye muscles and a problem that can be addressed in vision therapy and, as an extension of the same, with the Purple Book of the Eye Can Too! Read series of e-books that I wrote. Intervention should start with a thorough eye exam by an eye doctor.

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.

Reading Focus Card

Joan emailed me after she read my website because we both come from St. Louis and we both have products to help students who are struggling readers. We had a great conversation the other night too and discovered that she has met the eye doctors I work for (I thought I recognized her reading focus card when I browsed her website- www.ReadingFocusCard.com) It is a tool that for anyone with deficits in the development of their saccadic eye movements- those short little hops that we make when moving from one word, line, or paragraph to the next. Of course, my perspective is that this condition can and should be resolved after a developmental optometrist provides a complete vision examination and prescribes the appropriate corrections, exercises, and vision therapy. Of course, my hope is that teachers everywhere become informed about learning related vision skills - how to recognize students who need intervention - and that they also will experiment with the learning activities in my series of e-books. The Purple Book deals explicitly with saccadic eye movements - by providing academic activities for students in grades K-8 which exercise and could improve these eye movements and at the same time promote more efficient reading skills as well. Go Joan!

Jigsaw Puzzles Develop Visual Perceptual Skills

Children who hate doing simple jigsaw puzzles should be encouraged to do a simpler similar task so that their visual perceptual skills will improve. What visual skills are involved in doing a jigsaw puzzle?

1. Visual spatial relations is the ability to recognize patterns between the puzzle pieces. In a jigsaw puzzle you must recognize that some pieces have a straight edge, for example. Thus, they produce the outer frame of the puzzle. 
2. Visual closure is the ability to predict what an image will look like when you only see a portion of it. To solve a jigsaw puzzle you have to be able to visualize which pieces fit into openings made by the other pieces.
3. Scanning the array of unused pieces is an eye movement skill. People with saccadic deficits will have difficulty finding the right jigsaw piece.
4. Visual memory is the skill that allows a person to create a mental image and then refer to it. This skill must be in place when searching for pieces and when returning to the incomplete puzzle to place the selected piece.
5. Visual attention is a basic skill that must be in place before the simplest puzzle can be completed. People who do not value the information received by their eyes will not do well at jigsaw puzzles. They tend to try to locate things by touch instead of by sight.
6. The ability to transition between a central fixation with peripheral vision is necessary to complete any jigsaw puzzle. This skill is often very under-developed in individuals on the Autism Spectrum

Each of these visual skills must be developed and in place in order to enjoy and be successful at doing jigsaw puzzles. Academic success also depends on each of these visual skills. So, if your children do not like doing jigsaw puzzles, do not allow them to avoid them. Try using simple preschool puzzles and time how long it takes to complete them. Challenge your child to beat their previous time. Go to a teachers' supply store and purchase parquetry blocks or tangram workbooks. Even inexpensive dot-to-dot books will help to develop a child's visual closure and scanning skills while the hidden picture puzzles in Highlights or the I Spy book series will also improve a child's puzzle solving skills. 

Remember to schedule an annual eye exam with an eye doctor who incorporates vision therapy into their practice. These developmental optometrists routinely examine children's visual perceptual development and can prescribe in-office vision therapy activities to help.

In addition, the Eye Can Too! Read series of e-books contains helpful home-based activities and resources that you can easily adapt for any individual child or classroom.

For Teachers About Learning & Vision

Teachers should be the first line of intervention when one of their students has a learning-related vision problem since they get to see the children at work every day. When a student covers one eye or puts their head down so that only one eye points towards the text or paper, the teacher should recognize that this child needs to see an eye doctor to rule out amblyopia, or problems teaming the eyes to keep a word or other image single. When a student squints or complains of having a headache often during school - especially when asked to copy work from the board or smart-board to a piece of paper on their desk, the teacher should suggest that the student's parent make an eye appointment to make sure that the child knows how to accommodate i.e. switch their focus from near to far and back again efficiently. When a student cannot line up the digits in a math problem or appropriately space words on their paper, the teacher should first offer some practical hints but if these do not seem to help, it is time for a referral to an eye doctor to make sure that the child's eye movements and visual perceptual skills are developing on schedule. When a student makes frequent reversals when reading or writing - especially after the second grade, this may be a visual spatial delay in the skills of laterality and directionality. Finally, when a student has trouble in PE or on the playground catching or aiming balls or, in general, has under-performing gross motor skills, the root of the problem could the visual-motor-integration. While each of these symptoms can make success in school very difficult, all of them can be addressed by a few weeks or months of in-office vision therapy under the supervision of a developmental optometrist. No child should be left behind in school because of addressable learning-related vision problems.

Before you Medicate, Investigate- ADHD & Vision

Clinical research has established that there is a link between a diagnosis of ADHD and certain vision deficits or delays in children. Many children with ADHD also test positive for a saccadic eye movement deficit. This means that they have difficulty moving their eyes efficiently and accurately from one fixed visual target to another as in going from one word or line to the next on a page of text. Many children with ADHD also test positive for a convergence insufficiency (CI). This means that they are unable to cross their eyes or team them appropriately and may experience words moving, blurring, or doubling on a page. They may get headaches when reading or they may, without ever being aware of it, suppress the vision in one eye. Many children with ADHD also test positive for accommodative infacility (AI) which means that they have trouble adjusting their focus when looking from a near image to a different image in the distance.

The good news is that all three of these visual diagnoses can be addressed with a program of in-office vision therapy under the supervision of a developmental optometrist. So, if your child has been diagnosed or if you are being encouraged to obtain a diagnosis of ADHD, don't stop there. Arrange an appointment for your child to receive a comprehensive eye exam by a developmental optometrist who incorporates vision therapy into their practice. If the eye doctor finds that your child has any of these visual problems, follow through with the program of vision therapy. To find a developmental optometrist in your area, plug your zip code into the search box at www.covd.org.

You can read more about this in: Borsting, Eric; Michael Rouse, and Ray Chu. Measuring ADHD behaviors in children with symptomatic accommodative dysfunction or convergence insufficiency: a preliminary study. "Optometry", Volume 76. Number 10. October 2005

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.

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.

Poor Reading Fluency May Indicate a Learning-related Visual Challenge

Efficient readers move their eyes quickly across a page of text decoding words and processing meaning. The most efficient readers even scan and recognize familiar words by their shapes. It takes more than good phonetic skills and a good visual memory to read fluently though. People who have deficits of their saccadic eye movement skills can't usually do it. Because their eye muscles are not developed well enough for them to control where to point their eyes, they may not be able to maintain a fixation long enough to process the word or its meaning. When they lose the fixation, they also lose their place in the text.

Fortunately, saccadic eye movement skills are fairly straight forward to improve. Starting with monocular activities that exercise each eye by itself, the eye muscles get strengthened enough to become much more reliable within a few weeks. Like I tell my younger vision therapy patients who are struggling with saccadic eye movement deficits, "You are supposed to be the boss of your eyes but they are mocking you and saying, 'We don't have to do what you say. We can do anything we want." After several weeks of consistent practice, most patients gain significantly better skills.

Until they can manage quick and accurate saccadic eye movements while also doing a cognitive task at the same time, though, the optometrist typically will not discharge a patient from vision therapy.

While there are other learning related visual issues which can result in poor reading fluency like a convergence insufficiency or a visual perceptual delay, improving your student's saccadic eye movement skills will usually result in an increase in reading speed, fluency, and comprehension.

The good news is that even if you do not have a diagnosed deficit of your saccadic eye movements, anyone can improve their reading speed, fluency, and comprehension using the activities in the Purple Book of the Eye Can Too! Read series. (Click on the links at the right of the blog to preview the series at Home School Incorporated.) While written with the home school context in mind, the activities are appropriate for anyone and can even be adapted for use in a classroom learning center. The book contains graded academic activities that all also rely on and build saccadic eye movements.

Of course, every child should be examined by a developmental optometrist or other eye doctor once each year to make sure that their vision is developing normally, the eyes are healthy, and if they need glasses, they have the correct prescription. If you are concerned about the possibility that your child has a learning related visual problem, be sure to let the doctor know.

Incomplete Math Worksheets May Indicate Learning-Related Visual Issues

Many elementary school math worksheets and tests contain a single sheet of problems arranged in rows and columns. It makes sense. More problems fit on the same page so you save paper. The problems can be solved by working directly on the sheet showing their carries and borrows so that the teacher can easily see if the student knows the concepts and if they deserve partial credit if they got the answer wrong.

But, students whose learning-related visual skills are challenged by ocular motility deficits of either their saccadic or pursuits eye movements may have a very difficult time completing the assignment. Since these students have not yet developed adequate automatic control of their eye muscles (there are six muscles connected to each eye), they may not be able to hold a visual fixation on a single math problem long enough to find it in the first place. So, the paper they turn in may look like a piece of Swiss cheese because so many problems are left undone. In addition, for the same visual reason, these students may start to answer one problem, look away for a second (perhaps to look up while thinking or trying to remember the math fact) and be unable to find the problem again. So the answer to one problem may be written on a different problem nearby.

So, after attacking all the problems (not really) that they perceive, the students assume that they have completed the work and hand it in. "You didn't do all the problems," says the teacher (probably for the 50 thousand time since the year started), surprising and frustrating the student who really really tried. "Go back and finish the paper." A few minutes later, the student returns, again thinking that the whole assignment is done. A few more problems may be, but there are still many left undone, leaving "holes" on the worksheet. Yet, if the teacher points to a problem while the student completes it, or assesses the students' learning another way, these students may be able to show mastery of the mathematical skills that the worksheet was meant to assess.

It isn't that they do not understand how to solve the arithmetic. It could be that they have deficits of their eye movements. They probably are the same students who lose their place when reading, skip little words, and find paper and pencil tasks laborious, frustrating, and terribly time consuming. But, they are obviously intelligent, articulate, and engaged when the learning is delivered and assessed without a need for reading and writing.

These students do not have to spend 12 years of their lives being frustrated and feeling a sense of failure. Recommend that they see a developmental optometrist for a complete binocular vision examination. Then, follow up with in-office vision therapy if it is indicated.

In addition, these students may be assisted to improve their eye muscle control with the activities in the first (Purple Book) of the Eye Can Too! Read series. While the activities are designed with the home school context in mind, many of them are appropriate for use in the regular elementary school classroom. They each serve an academic as well as a visual objective and come with suggestions for what to do when you observe certain behaviors as your students do the activities.

Tossing Bean Bags Can Improve A Child's Reading

Children who struggle with reading because they keep losing their place, skip little words, or miss entire lines may have deficits of their eye movement skills. Since there are three pairs of muscles connected to each eyeball, (that's 12 muscles in all), the eye can be accurately pointed towards an exact point in space often without the need for the head to move at all. Of course, if a child's eye movements have not developed to a place where she can control them automatically and efficiently, she will find reading difficult or frustrating. Tossing bean bags can help her control her eye movements. Here's how to give directions for the activity for which you need nothing more than two bean bags:

• Hold a bean bag at waist level, palm up in one hand
• Hold the other hand also at waist level, palm up
• Toss the bean bag from one hand to the other in a large soft arc
• Watch the bean bag from the time it leaves the first hand, following it constantly until it lands in the second hand
• Toss the bean bag back and forth without taking your eyes off the bean bag

If it is difficult for your child to catch the bean bag, suggest that he make sure to look at the hand with which he needs to catch the bean bag right before the bean bag lands there. You may need to issue the same cue with every new toss at first.

When this becomes easy for your child, make the activity more difficult.

• Hold one bean bag in one hand as before with the other hand at the waist, palm-up, in order to catch it
• Toss the bean bag as before
• When the bean bag is flying, clap one time. Then, catch the bean bag
• Toss it back, clapping and catching with the other hand

When this becomes easy, make the activity even more difficult.

• Hold two bean bags, one in each hand at waist level, palms up
• Toss one bean bag in an arc
• Watch the bean bag that is flying
• When the bean bag is in the air, mid-flight, clap the other bean bag into the hand that threw the first bean bag (DO NOT Throw the second bean bag - CLAP It!)
• Catch the first bean bag with the now empty hand
• Continue for as many repetitions as possible

As your child masters these simple and quite entertaining activities, she will become more aware of how to direct her eyes. The longer she can sustain the activity, the more she will exercise her eye muscles. While this activity alone will not remediate a severe eye movement deficit, it will begin to give your child experience using and developing their ocular motilities.

If your child has difficulty reading because he loses his place, skips words or misses whole lines you should not assume that he will grow out of it. Instead, schedule your child for a complete eye exam at a developmental optometrist who has experience with binocular vision and who incorporates vision therapy into his practice. Click on the link (at the top right of this blog) to the College of Optometrists in Vision Development to find a member eye doctor in your area.

You may also be interested in purchasing the first book (the Purple Book) in my Eye Can Too! Read series because it provides a series of academic activities for elementary school students which rely on the eye movement skills of saccades and pursuits. All of these activities are designed to be done at home facilitated by a parent. Every child can improve their eye movement skills just like every athlete can improve their strength and dexterity. To purchase your copy of this book, just click on the link at the top right corner of this blog.

What Do Children Say When They Have Learning-Related Visual Challenges?

"I shut one eye when I read because it is easier," one second grade boy admitted to me at a recent in-office vision therapy session. His diagnosis includes saccadic deficits and convergence insufficiency. He hates to read. No wonder! The words don't stay put on the page when he attempts to read and he can't keep them single unless he closes one eye. However, that strategy deprives him of some detail and appreciation for depth. Within the next 6-12 weeks, though, he should notice a significant difference. The vision therapy activities that we do together and that he does between the weekly sessions at home are research-based and proven to strengthen the eye muscles as well as to help him realize how to coordinate and team both eyes to point to the same location at the same time, thus keeping the image single as well as 3-dimensional.

The next patient, a first grade girl who is in her eighth week of in-office vision therapy, surprised both her mother and me. Her diagnosis is saccadic deficits. This means that she has difficulty moving her eyes quickly and efficiently from one stationary visual target to another- like what the eyes do when moving from a word or a line of text to the next without loss of place, or skipping. I asked her if she has noticed any changes when she reads since she started coming to vision therapy. She said, "Yes, there aren't two words anymore." While this correlates with some of the anecdotal findings I have recorded about her progress, since she did not have a diagnosis related to eye teaming such as convergence insufficiency or convergence excess, we did not realize that she was suffering from dyplopia, double vision. Children have no other visual experience than their own so frequently they do not identify their visual challenges in language that tips off the adults that they need some interventions. This child has more vision therapy work to do to resolve the saccadic deficits but imagine how much more comfortably and successfully her school days must be now that the letters and words on a page look clear, stable, and single.

Vision therapy is an intervention that works to address quite a few learning-related visual issues. If your child is struggling at school, let me encourage you to schedule a comprehensive binocular vision exam with a developmental optometrist who is experienced with pediatric patients and who also incorporates vision therapy into their optometry practice.

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

Even Adults Can Gain Better Learning-Related Visual Skills

Yesterday my editor for the Eye Can Too! Read series of books emailed this: "Today I was reading something and suddenly realized. . . I’d been reading!! I had been reading for a quite a while (5 minutes) without a break-off, and yet also unselfconsciously. After those five minutes I started my breaks again—but I believe I am seeing that your activities are working!! “Break” is my word for my kind of stop-start reading, going back and forth because I’m not comprehending—jumping all over. I think that before doing these activities I could only read for one minute before I started breaking. Maybe less than that."

By "your activities", she meant the activities in the first book in the Eye Can Too! Read series which give graded academic activities designed to give home school students experiences using saccadic eye movements and pursuits- the skills that help people move from word to word and line to line on a page of text without losing their place, skipping words, or getting lost...

When we began working on the book project neither one of us suspected that she had any learning-related vision challenges. She wears glasses- but lots of people do. Glasses correct a person's ability to see clearly at near or in the distance. However, when I took her to see the vision therapy practice in which I work under the supervision of a team of developmental optometrists, she had a huge amount of difficulty doing the most basic eye movement and eye teaming activities. Now, I am not qualified to diagnose anyone about anything, but I could suggest that if she did some of the basic activities in the Purple Book of the series, which became available in September 2008, she would gain ground. And I absolutely recommended that she locate a developmental optometrist in her local area who would be able to give her a comprehensive eye exam and follow up with a customized program of vision therapy.

As we have continued to talk about how she is doing, she has realized that she has never actually read an entire book straight through. Instead, she has developed all kinds of strategies to help her process the book's information - like note-taking and re-reading each paragraph three or four times- habits that make her a very excellent editor. The effort that she must have needed to earn a college degree and an MBA had to be huge. Now she can begin to envision a day when reading will be fun. I am so pleased to have been placed in association with her and I trust that many others who have a life-time of reading difficulties will find the same encouragement to have a comprehensive vision examination by a developmental optometrist no matter how old they are.

Even this morning on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition", Joe Palca reported about his difficulties with 3-d vision because of amblyopia. Amblyopia, or lazy eye, is another condition that responds to vision therapy activities especially when the patient is young. However, new research is demonstrating that even adults can be trained to achieve stereo vision. Palca's report gives a great example of what happens in a vision evaluation and at vision therapy sessions.(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99083752).

Why do some people move their heads back and forth when they are reading?

If you have to move your head to follow the text when you read your ocular motilities may be deficient. When the six eye muscles in each eye move efficiently in coordination with each other, they can make very fine eye movements. The muscles coordinate to point the eyeballs to keep a visual image near and single. People who use their neck muscles to point their eyes don't realize this- it isn't a conscious failure, though. These people may have deficits of their saccadic eye movements, the short little hops that the eyes make from the end of one word or line of text to the beginning of the next. These same individuals may find it helpful to use a straight edge to keep their place while reading. They may also experience frequent loses of place and may habitually skip little words or even whole lines of text. Developmental optometrists often incorporate vision therapy in their practices. Simple activities and exercises can often promote the development of great saccadic eye movements over a period of several weeks.