Vision Therapy

It works, but it’s not always enough by itself. Our dd had severe developmental vision delays and did 6 months of vision therapy when she was 8-1/2yo. This brought her “visual efficiency” skills up to age appropriate levels (e.g., focusing speed, binocular fusion, gross saccades). However, we had to follow up vision therapy with PACE (http://www.learninginfo.com) to develop her “visual processing” skills (e.g., visual sequencing, visual short-term memory, fine saccades), and Phono-Graphix to teach her decoding skills.

Although the vision therapy was necessary to bring dd’s sensory/motor visual skills up to par, we didn’t see a great deal of improvement in reading fluency until she was about 6 weeks into PACE. At that point, her reading started to improve dramatically. Before PACE she tested as reading at a 2nd grade level, but 1.8 STD’s below the norm in both rate and accuracy. After PACE she tested as reading at a normal 4th grade level. PACE doesn’t actually teach decoding skills. In my dd’s case, much of her initial problems with reading were due to her poor visual processing skills. PACE exercises are really good at developing those skills.

We followed up PACE with a Phono-Graphix intensive (http://www.readamerica.net) to give dd advanced decoding and word analysis skills.

Dd was reading at a preschool level at age 8-1/2. Over a two-year period we did Reading Reflex at home, vision therapy, PACE and the PG-intensive. At the end of that 18 months she was reading at a fluent 6th grade level. We still need to work on reading regularly, as she has a tendency to backslidea little, but she consistently scores 90+ for her grade level in reading on standardized tests now.

Some children have auditory processing problems, which can complicate the picture. Our dd had only visual processing and phonological processing delays.

One thing — usually a lot of the vision therapy exercises can be done at home to minimize costs. Not all behavioral optometrists are willing to supervise a primarily home-based program, but many will. If cost is a consideration, you may want to check into this, as it would free up money for follow-up therapies if they are needed.

Mary

My dd has been in vision therapy since February. They not only address vision issues, but motor development issues as well, and they work on the perception issues. She is just now starting PACE. I read a lot of MN posts and have learned a lot and probably would second guess whether we should do PACE had it not been for the valuable information contained in MN posts. While I know that she might be limited because she might still have some sensory issues, I am already encouraged by things I see that she is able to do that I would have never thought she could do. My dd’s most obvious disability is her language — so obvious that it somehow camoflauged some of the other areas and are not tackling those.

This website has been extremely helpful to me. I feel that I can talk intelligently with her provider about certain issues.

My daughter went through Vision Therapy about 2 years ago. She is now almost 10. She had a lot of school related problems, but this was the first thing to be diagnosed. She was tested and went through the Vision therapy for about 9 months in a therapy office, 1/2 hour, twice a week. Most of the therapy was covered by my insurance. You might want to check on that, but maybe it will be covered. My daughter has also been diagnosed with ADHD and central auditory processing disorder, but every time she goes through another test with another therapist, doctor, psychologist, etc., the tests all come back the same—she is doing better than age level visually now. It is helping her compensate for her other problems.