There is little doubt in my mind that my son really does have the eye muscles of a 3 year old.
We are to do 3 sets of exercises. The first involves patching one eye and having him follow a pen light (you could use just a regular pen too), left, right, up down, diagnols, circles etc.. He must keep his head still and only use his eye. This is sheer agony for him. The hardest thing by far he has ever done. He doesn’t have alot of trouble doing this with both eyes as we had been doing that for awhile.
My 4 year old has absolutely no trouble doing this and thinks it is fun.
When I think about this kid walking around like this, trying to learn with this awful problem it makes me a little mad that there isn’t more awareness out there that this type of problem exists.
I will fill you guys in on the other 2 exercises in case anyone wants to try them.
The second exercise involves a very thin stick (like a toothpick but about 6 inches in length) He must wear his patch, keep his arms at his side and lift the stick placing it into a straw (the straw has about twice the size hole of a regular straw) that I hold out in front of him. He only gets one try and must put his hand back down if he doesn’t insert it on the first try. He can’t fish for it. I move the straw to different positions and he must insert it wherever I put it. He has trouble with this when it involves crossing the midline and is prone to twisting his body to avoid crossing the midline.
The third exercise involves an 8x10 page with letters about 1 inch apart. The letters are about size 30 font. He has to look at and say the letter all the way to the left then all the way to the right then second to the left then second to the right and so on until he says the two middle letters. He goes down the page doing this at each row. He of course has to keep his head still and only move his eyes. All the exercises are done that way with straight posture and hands down at sides.
I don’t know why but he does not have any trouble with the third exercise. It is even easy for him. The VT was surprised by this but I think it has something to do with some of the exercises I had done in the past. Maybe it was the circle ‘e’s.
I stopped audiblox because I really think he needs to have these ocular motor problems worked out first. I wish I did this long ago.
awesome. Thanks for sharing.
I truly admire you Linda .. I feel like such a slug compared to you and how much you get accomplished.
Question: how long do you do the light pen exercise? and which eye is patched? Do you alternate?
Thanks!!
Re: awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Yes, alternate and do it with both eyes unpatched.
Geeeez, I guess we all feel like slugs. I have been at this for 3 years and I can’t believe I did’t know he had this pretty severe problem until now.
If you want I will share the weekly exercises. They say the first 6 weeks they do the same for all and then they put together an individual plan that addresses more of the processing, visulalizing and other motor type issues.
I had an idea for the straw exercise. I test tube or a coke bottle would work, then you just have to find a thin stick.
I had years of vision therapy..
As a kid I had lots of whammys…ADHD, a hearing impairment which my parents didn’t see the need to supply a hearing aid…I also had Strabismus and had my first surgery at 2 years and my second one at 7 years..After the 2nd surgery I had years of eye therapy…In between that I went from Special ed classes to GATE…with the appropriate therapy and parental involvement a child can make rapid gains…
Vision therapy is good stuff…hang in there…
Re: We started vision therapy.
How exciting!!!! My son is starting next week (on the 12th!). It will be interesting to see what exercises he will be given. I’ll share those with everyone too so we can compare and maybe even help each other.
What kind of patch do you use? I’ve been having my son do this same exercise with both eyes for awhile so I’ll have to try it patched as well.
Thanks for sharing the exercises here!
Re: We started vision therapy.
Just one comment. It is really important to not move the head. If he can not easily do this, then he may have issues with head/eye differentiation which need to be addressed first. This was my son but we didn’t know it when he was in vision therapy.
Beth
Re: We started vision therapy.
Hi, my name is Teresa Sewell, I would appreciate your posting additional eye exercises I had my son Hunter tested and vision therapy was suggested for him but neither my nor my husband’s insurance pays for such therapy, the cost for the amount of therapy he was needing was $5,600 which we couldn’t afford so I would really appreciate your posting the exercises. Hunter works with an OT for 30 min. each week but I don’t think she is working with him much on vision therapy. thanks Teresa
Re: We started vision therapy.
Thank You for all the supportive posts!
Theresa,
I will definitely post the exercises each week. My son did OT for a year and it did help with some of his issues. I think he even had some of his visual issues remediated through OT. He used to write slanted down the page and start in the middle as opposed to the left upper corner of the page. That is much better now.
I have taken MMM suggestion of doing it twice a day rather than the whole 15 minutes at once. It is just to hard for him to do it all at once. I have to say though that his eye muscles are getting better. I can see him gaining more control already.
His right eye seems fine. His left eye is just a mess.
Re: We started vision therapy.
Teresa,
Another good source for vision exercises is Dr. Lane’s book “Developing Your Child for Success.” Here’s a website for more info:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1878145002/ref=ase_theoutofsyncchil/104-7498149-4340718?v=glance&s=books
I bought this book and I think it has some very good exercises in it.
Re: Where's Rod?
Hi marion,
I’m not normally on this board, but someone told me my name had come up….*s*
Just to be clear, vision therapy is sort of a “black box” to me. I’ve got some idea what they do, and a pretty good idea as to the problems they address, but I don’t do vision therapy.
My experience comes from referring kids into vision therapy and then seeing how changed they are later. I teach reading in private practice and have gradually found that an awful lot of kids who are having trouble learning to read seem to have a vision issue that’s gone undetected.
The discussions about exercises always make me a little uncomfortable, simply because some of the problems involve being “too this, or too that.” If your child’s eyes tend to converge too closely, an exercise that is designed to correct a problem where a child’s eyes converge too far out might be exactly the wrong exercise for your child. And yet, my knowledge of this is limited enough that I’m not even sure if what I just said is entirely accurate. But that’s why I stay out of the home-vision-therapy-exercise discussions.
Sometimes insurance will pay for the initial examinations, by the way. You may want to check on that. Also, the vision therapists I know get a lot done for $1,000 to $1,500, so it doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive.
Good luck….Rod
I , too, was amazed to see the difference in my daughter after vision exercises.
I owe this board a great deal-this is where I first read of vision therapy. I was persuaded by two reading specialists that it was all hooey-directly related to the colored overlay scams. I listened to the reading people and didn’t go although my daughter clearly fit the profile-rubbing her eyes, unable to ‘read’ for more than a few minutes. Finally, her 3rd grade teacher, a former nurse, related to me her observation of my daughter trying to cut graph paper into blocks to illustrate mulitplication problems. My daugher could multiply and understood the concepts of a 3x7 group of squares but for the life of her, could not cut them out. The teacher’s description was that “she was at sea” with the lines in the graph paper. That di it.
The difference in a month of 2 x daily excercises made the world of difference. 2 1/2 years later, we still do the exercises every other weekend.
If you saw my post of NIMH article a while ago, it talks about brain studies of dyslexics and the visial tacking of movement in the brain. Struck home as our main exercise was tracking a moving, suspended ball improving binocular focus on a moving object of varing distances.
The only problem with vision therapy, IMHO, is the getting acceptance that this is a valid therapy for certain kids.
Cheers to you and yours