Vision Therapy Adventure

I keep thinking that I would like to address my oldest son's vision problems on this blog but have yet to find a way to introduce the topic. So please allow me to stumble through this post as best I can and forgive my un-scientific explanations.

Last school year my younger boy started reading at 5 years old, pretty normal. As a matter of fact it was the realization of how normal it is that increased my concern over my 7 year old's lack of reading. Don't get me wrong, he could read but certainly not at grade level.

I'd been secretly worrying that maybe it was me who was failing him. As a homeschool mom, I thought maybe I was doing a terrible job and we just weren't putting enough effort into it. At the same time I knew that the typical way of doing things just wouldn't work for him. We did a lot of things orally and we tweeked almost every resource I purchased in order to minimize his frustration.

But when I saw my little boy learn to read with ease I knew it wasn't my failure and that something else was going on. So I decided to finally get some help.

First we went to an occupational therapist who had been a homeschooling mother and offered handwriting classes. She felt safe and comfortable to me. She spent about 45 minutes with my son and knew by the end of our time together that he had a vision problem. This was news to me, he had an eye exam at his 5 year old check up and they said his vision was fine.

But we checked out the developmental optometrist and sure enough discovered that W (that's what I'm going to start calling him on this blog from now on.) has problems with focus, coordination (as in getting his eyes to work together) and tracking. He can see the words on the page fine but he can't keep his eyes and his brain working together in a way that allows him to succeed in the areas of reading and writing.

In order to treat these problem's W has begun vision therapy once a week and will continue to do so for 9 months. What is vision therapy you ask? Good question, click here for more information.

Any way, more on this later. This is just kind of an intro for future posts.