W's Monologue

Monday evening W started taking acting classes with a local organization. He's signed up for a beginners class for children ages 8 - 12 that will meet once a week from now until the end of February. We don't know anyone else with this group and have never been involved in theater so this will be quite an adventure for all of us.

He really enjoyed his first class and was sent home with a short monologue from Alice in Wonderland, to work on this week. The note he brought home with it stated that he need not memorize it but instead just read it over several times this week. The note also said they'd be working on their monologues next week so because he was not asked to memorize it I'm assuming he'll be reading it in front of the class.

I've written before about W's vision problems and how they relate to his reading. He is currently reading Frog and Toad books with no problem but when I asked him to underline the words he wasn't sure about in this monologue, it was about half of them.

So...I made flashcards for all of the underlined words and we'll be working on them a lot this week. I'm hesitant to have him read the entire monologue to me more than 5 or 6 times this week though because I know he will just memorize it and maybe still not know the words. That's how he has learned to compensate for his vision issues.

Anyway, I hoping this will give W an even more compelling reason to work hard and make progress. He's done such a good job with his vision therapy but sometimes it seems like he doesn't really care about making progress with his reading. I'm hoping now he will at least for this class.

Vision Therapy Progress Test

W was given a progress test a few weeks ago at the vision therapist's office and these were the results!

Focusing flexibility: much improved

Near Point of Convergence: above normal; consistent
Quick eye movements (saccades): nearly perfect; movements lose some rhythm when speeding up.

Improved attention to visual detail

Passed color vision test this time

Praise the Lord!!

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.