Does anyone have any recent information on using vision therapy for teens with reading difficulties? My daughter has tracking, depth perception, fine motor,and headaches due to light as well as reading difficulties. We are considering vision therapy for the summer. Any thoughts or experiences send my way please.
Re: vision therapy for teens
Check out the information at http://www.childrensvision.com. Deficits in tracking and depth perception can both usually be improved significantly with vision therapy, even in adults.
You might also want to experiment with colored overlays. If your daughter is that sensitive to light, she may respond well to having the contrast between print and background changed (which is what colored overlays do). An inexpensive way to experiment is to use plastic file folders.
Vision therapy alone is not enough for some children. If you don’t see sufficient gains in reading from just the vision therapy, then I would recommend following it up with cognitive training. Both PACE (http://www.learninginfo.com) and Audiblox (http://www.audiblox2000.com) are very good programs.
Vision therapy brings sensory/motor vision skills up to age-appropriate levels. Cognitive training develops the next layer — visual processing skills, which includes visual sequencing, visual short-term memory, pattern recognition, directionality, processing speed, etc.
Mary
Re: vision therapy for teens
A fruend has a teenaged student who’s just completed vision therapy. It seems to have been successful in one eye but not the other so the discussion now is whether or not to continue the therapy in that eye.
Vision therapy won’t, by itself, solve the problems with reading. What it WILL do is have the eyes be capable of learning how to do the work of reading.
I like a dance analogy: if you have a very badly toned, out of shape body, you won’t be able to learn how to do ballet variations. It just won’t work. But then you spend some time getting it into shape and voila! finally you have a well-toned body with perfect muscles to do the work… But you still have to learn the dance.
After vision therapy, you still have to learn to read.
I am an EC teacher and my school Psychologist’s daughter just finished this therapy. It cost over $1000 and they can see little difference.