We now offer a service at our office called vision therapy that helps kids who are struggling with vision-related reading difficulties. Vision therapy is a lot like physical/occupational therapy for the eyes. Just like some people struggle with balance and coordination on their feet, some people struggle with coordination of their eyes.
Poor eye coordination causes a child to struggle with keeping his or her place while reading resulting in seeing letters or even whole words and sentences out of order affecting reading comprehension and speed. This can lead to these common signs:
1. Loses Place when Reading (or has to use finger or other interventions to keep place)
2. Child has an A-B brain, but gets C-D grades
3. The child may say that the words and letters move, double, or float on the page
4. Skips words or lines when reading
5. Difficulty finishing homework on time
6. Letter Reversals
Between our binocular vision evaluation (testing eye alignment) and vision therapy evaluation (testing eye movement and processing of vision information in the brain) we test for about 20 additional visual skills beyond just how small of a letter can the person see clearly. We accept Medicaid reimbursement for vision therapy services because we want to help these kids improve their potential so do not let fear of cost deter potential children from benefiting.
Our testing is scored against age-matched data so that we are comparing the visual skills of the child to the peers sitting next to them in the classroom. We custom tailor our therapy to each individual patient to maximize efficiency in improving the child’s reading performance. By working on the fundamentals of eye coordination, much like drills in basketball practice we can work on isolating and improving certain visual skills so that when all the visual skills are combined in the difficult visual task of reading our eyes are as effective and efficient as the other kids in the classroom.
For more information visit www.covd.org or schedule an evaluation with us today!