Vision Therapy for reading difficulties anyone?

[karne]

In a different thread on dyslexia a poster mentioned something called "Vision Therapy" as a treatment option for reading difficulties and/or dyslexia. I think we're going along fine with the reading recovery program right now, but I am intrigued. Anyone have any experience, pro or con. Any thoughts about what might have led you to investigate this option? Thanks!

[Momily]

Special educator here chiming in.

There is a lot of research out there that points to the fact that for the vast majority of children and adults, dyslexia is an auditory problem rather than a visual one. Children with dyslexia typically have some combination of poor phonemic awareness (the ability to hear, blend, segment, and manipulate the individual sounds that make up words) and poor word retrieval (the ability to pull up specific words from their memory). The best intervention for children with these difficulties is a combination of highly structured phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, and lots of practice reading leveled texts.

Having said that once in a while I run into a child for whom the visual system is clearly causing problems. For example, I have a 7 year old boy I'm working with right now who has major visual processing issues. He can recognize a number of sight words, and sound out 3 and 4 sound words albeit slowly, but unless I point to each word one at a time he gets lost when confronted with a sentence. Even if there's only a single sentence made up completely of words he can read, he will skip words, repeat words, move from right to left, or make other errors. He also shows a lot of other difficulties associated with visual motor skills and visual processing, including very delayed math skills. For a child like this I think that vision therapy is a great idea.

[karne]

Thank-you. I was not aware of the auditory piece, and I'd love to read more about it. When my child was at a private school with a delayed-reading approach and having difficulties this system was mentioned, so I looked into it. It's expensive and not covered by insurance. In pub. school we were introduced to reading recovery, which seems to have the elements of structure and practice, which you mentioned, and the results have been fairly dramatic, to say the least.

[mamatoady]

My dd, 5.5, has been doing vision therapy since september. She's doing it for reasons other than dislexia (she can't read yet anyway) but I know they have a lot of kids with that label there who make amazing progress.

We go to the Excel Institute in Traverse City, Michigan....I think you can google it.

sarah