Victor just turned 7. When he was in preschool, they recommended he start kindergarten a year later and I agreed because he was clearly not ready. I had some private testing done before kindergarten and he was found to be very intelligent but with visual processing issues. Now, he is in 1st grade. Even though I have been working with him a lot at home, hoping we could get him caught up with the extra year, he is stuggling to keep up with his classmates. He gets the concepts, total phonetic awareness, but very slow processing speed and lots of reversals. Also, he is very emotional. I volunteer a lot in class. He was doing catch up work when the teacher began a spelling test. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do until I drew his attention to the spelling test. By then, he was lost and confused and cried until everyone went out to recess. I went to him then and let him do the spelling test and helped him catch up before the other children came back. I went home and wrote up the request for an evaluation and turned it in to the principal before I picked Victor up from school. The principal was expecting it because we’ve been talking about it since he was in kindergarten last year. I’ve been reading about what everyone has to say in the LMB thread and I was wondering if you all can tell me what programs are best for children who have phonetic awareness but visual processing challenges? I have visual processing issues myself but wasn’t DX until about my 10th attempt at college (after dropping out of my first year of high school). I never received intervention, just accommodation in college… use of computer and extended test time. Practice, practice and more practice, word perfect and acceptance that I will never be perfect have helped me a lot. Still haven’t made much progress in my being hopelessly disorganized though. Any words of wisdom for my son appreciated. I am familiar with the IEP process because my other son is high functioning autistic (the little guy can read and do math way beyond his years though).
Visual processing.
You may want to have him evaluated by a dev optometrist.
Vision therapy has definitely improved my son’s visual processing. We needed to deal with his underlying ocular motor, focusing (accomodation) tracking, right left differentiation (laterality) issues before going after the processing. Our optometrist addresses all of these issues but some do not fully address processing. I would interview several optometrist before committing to one.
We have done interactive metronome as well and I am quite sure that has improved processing speed based on his performance on exercises that require increased processing speed that we are doing through vision therapy that improved markedly after some gains with IM. There are some studies that support this. Also, your comments about your child seeming lost, not knowing what to do was my son before IM. It helped him to gain focus and understand where he needed to be and what he needed to do. It cut his homework time from 2 hours to 30 minutes.
If you could only do one program I would recommend IM and if you were to pursue vision therapy I would do IM first. www.interactivemetronome.com
The eval was marginally helpful but the school did not really understand the concept of addressing underlying deficits.
Re: finally made formal evaluation request
If the school has any suggestions, I’ll be all ears but I’m less concerned with them providing services than accomodations in the years to come. I want everything documented so if a day comes when he needs to use a word processor or have more time on tests… it will be understood by the school. For now, all I want is for unfinished work to come home so he won’t be overwhelmed trying to catch up in class and his teacher is happy to arrange that. I am willing and able to provide private services for him, I’m just not sure which would benefit him best.
Re: finally made formal evaluation request
You just need to go for the evaluations first. Depending on how they turn out, you will know how to proceed. Don’t worry about school accomodations or placement until you get the test results.
Janis
The whole testing thing.
One issue with testing is that children with visual issues will often score lower on IQ tests than their true IQ after the visual issues are remediated. The problem with schools is that they don’t believe such issues can be effectively dealt with because they don’t usually address them. So, the end result can be lowered expectations and a child who is very frustrated because his visual issues prevent him from demonstrating all that he is truely capable of.
Errr, that is our story in an nutshell. It does have a happy ending though but it wouldn’t have if I had taken the school’s test results and bought into the lowered expectations.
Re: finally made formal evaluation request
Good to know… fortunately, I had a neuro-psych eval done about a year ago and the doctor thought my son was gifted.
Victor’s mom,
I think you need a full educational evaluation by a reading clinic like Lindamood Bell. You may also want to explore the possibility of having a developmental vision exam to rule out visual efficiency issues:
www.covd.org
Some people will recommend that you try programs like PACE and Audiblox to work on visual processing issues. But I’d still like to see you get a good reading eval (and vision) first.
Janis