Hi everyone,
I took my son for the second part of his developmental optometric screening. His tracking, etc. is fine; where she found some trouble was when my son (he’s 5) had to match shapes that were more abstract than circles, squares, etc. Interestingly, though, she said he could look at the shapes alone, remember them, and find the match that way, but not if they were on the same page. That would seem to indicate that he might have trouble recognizing word patterns on a page, as opposed to in isolation, right?
She also said that his skills were age-appropriate, but that he seemed bright and highly verbal, so it seemed almost like a relative deficit.
I have a book (Visual-Perceptual Skill Building) with exercises (match the shapes, etc.) that I’m going to try to use with him. Any other suggestions? The d/o wants to see him in 6 months and says “keep an eye on it.” She also noticed some gross-motor awkwardness. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance, once again.
Re: developmental optometrist report
Jerome Rosner has a book that tests visual perceptual skills and provides exercises using a geoboard that help develop them. It might be a nice supplement to the books.
It is much easier to develop the visual perceptual skills if you don’t have the underlying visual efficiency issues.
Beth
I think the Visual Perceptual Skill Building books are the way to go. You might want to supplement with simple tangrams and with geo-boards, both of which work on shape recognition and visual-spatial reasoning.
There doesn’t seem to be any real indication of a problem, so I would be inclined to wait two years rather than six months for a re-check. Some 5yos are simply a little slow to develop gross and fine motor skills. I wouldn’t be concerned about that either.
Most children are not totally even in development. That is, a child may be very bright in terms of oral language skills, but slightly slow in development of gross motor skills. That is likely to be normal development for the individual child.
Nancy