The words are moving!!!

It sounds like there is a vision problem — would the parents consider having her checked out by a developmental optometrist? Has she tried reading with one eye closed?

that she really needs to be taken by her parents to a developmental optometrist for evaluation. A website with information and links is http://www.childrensvision.com.

The regular portion of a developmental vision evaluation is usually covered by medical insurance, same as a regular eye exam. The developmental testing costs about $100-150 in the metropolitan area where we live.

Mary

I don’t know if this would help, but I just ordered the book “Eyes on Track” (a visual therapy book) by Remick. According to the information I read, it’s filled with over 50 exercises for helping vision.

I haven’t yet actually seen the book, and it will take a few weeks to arrive at the book store, but it might be something that you may want to look into.

These were the exact words one of my kids used last year when she was in first grade. Also, “the letters wiggle!” We pursued vision testing. She did have about six months of vision therapy through a developmental optometrist, funded partly by insurance, mostly by us, her parents. She is in second grade now and reading at grade level. It is still not her favorite activity in the world, and despite the vision therapy, if the print is small, she still uses a bookmark to hold her place. But, she is keeping up with her peers and will read for pleasure at times, especially if the topic is of high interest to her. Prior to vision therapy, even using a bookmark or touching each word with her finger was not enough to keep her eyes moving smoothly across the page. The suggestions re: developmental vision evaluation seem very worth pursuing. I hope the parents realize how lucky they are that their daughter has such a caring teacher. Take care!

I hate to jump into this one since there’s so much controversy. Do look for old posts by Rod — he works with a lot of kids who have had vision therapy and he apparently has a really good and professional doctor in his area.

Other causes (more on teaching ideas below): the “words are moving” in my own personal experience has been one of those 90%-10% divisions:

10% of the students in my experience have real vision problems and need a *detailed* vision exam by an *ophthalmologist* ( a medical doctor who deals with eyes), NOT the vision chart screening by the school nurse and NOT the measurement for glasses by the guy in Pearle vision or WalMart. Speaking as a person who lost the vision of my left eye due to untreated amblyopia that was denied and called all in my mind etc. — *of course* I passed the eyechart, I’m FARsighted — I can’t stress too much the necessity of doing a real, serious eye exam any time there seems to be a problem. It’s worth the money — what price would you put on your left eye? And I would refer to Rod’s old posts and try to find a really professional vision therapist for the same reason.

On the other hand, 90% of the time (in my personal experience, I’m not diagnosing over the internet) it’s something else. Some of the something elses it often is include bad teaching which has deliberately taught bad habits, bad teaching which has provided no guidance at all, stress, deliberate action which then sinks into the subconscious, and the equivalent of post-hypnotic suggestion.

Bad teaching deliberately teaching bad habits: The non-phonics advocates, since they don’t believe you figure out words from what is printed on the page, have to invent some other way to attempt to read. They directly teach children to swing their eyes in circles around the page, to look for pictures, to look for other familiar words, to try the end of the word first, and so on. Kids who have been taught this don’t even understand that they should be tracking left to right and top to bottom. Since the eyes are focusing all over the place, normal persistence of vision (the fact that a picture stays in your vision for a fraction of a second, what makes the individual frames of a film appear to move continuously) will make the letters appear to be wiggling and sliding.

Unfortunately habits you learn at age 5 tend to be really tenacious; even if the student is later tutored in functioning techniques, under fatigue or stress the old bad habits often creep back.

Total lack of guidance: the latest fad in education, the watered-down interpretation of “whole language” that hit the schools, asumed that if you read at kids long enough they would pick the skill up out of the air. Kids are sitting with books in awkward positions where they can’t focus and swinging their eyes all over frantically searching for clues, again with no idea of what appropriate tracking is. The results are even worse than the above since who knows what a child will make up in desperation to get the right answer?

Stress: the eyes are guided by muscles that are exactly the same as the other muscles in the body and react the same way. Under stress, we tend to tense up our muscles and make jerky and awkward motions and become accident-prone. The eyes can tense up and jerk too. As above, persistence of vision can mke the letters seem to be moving. And if you’ve been taught hope and guess and are being tested on stuff you can’t possibly know, you will be under a lot of stress.

Deliberate action: Most of us practiced crossing our eyes when we were kids, unfocusing, playing with objects near and far, and so on. I’ve seen other people post that they could make the letters on a page move around on purpose, and I know I can make them swim around pretty easily — just did it. A bored and frustrated kid will do this sort of self-stimulating behaviour on purpose. BUT after a time it becomes so much of a habit that he may forget that he started it on purpose and doesn’t know how to stop himself doing it. It’s like hair-chewing and picking at the same scab and all those other unpleasant things that a kid starts out of frustration/boredom and can’t stop, as they seem to take a life of their own. Confronting the kid roughly doesn’t help, although I prefer to be honest especially with older kids and point out the action and why I’m stopping them when they do it. Gentle continued correction over a LONG time (we’re talking months and years here), with the active cooperation of the student who really wants a change, will finally show results.

Similar to post-hypnotic suggestion: A psychologist or other super-authority figure, with a manner that is “good with children” (ie incredibly manipulative) asks the child in a meaningful tone “Now, dear, are the letters moving around on the page and sliding off the bottom?” The child wants to please the adult and it is clearly important, so the child nods yes and tries very hard to make it happen. After several sessions and lots of practice the child has achieved the desired symptoms and has forgotten where the idea came from. (This is no joke — several people were convicted of sexual abuse and later had their convictions overturned because of false “evidence” that was planted in children’s minds in just this manner. Tapes demonstrated the the false memories came from the psychologists and then the kids dutifully repeated them as well as they could at the next session.)

Teaching techniques: Patience is a virtue. Keep repeating this to yourself for the next year. It took several years of training for this eye habit to become stuck, and it’s going to take a year or two for it to become unstuck. Think of your own and friend’s habit problems such as smoking, eating problems, unhealthy diets, etc., and think how hard it is for you to make changes in how you do things.
Use a pointer and slide it under the words being read left-to-right, trying to keep exactly on not only the word but the letter/syllable of the word you are pronouncing at the time. Sit beside the child where you can see both the book and the child’s profile and every single time you see the eyes wander off track give a gentle reminder and re-start at the point where the eyes went off. The child will naturally resist this; it is not fun for either of you. The point isn’t fun and games, it’s habit retraining; fun and games are your reward when you can do this smoothly. Be patient, or if you get into parent-child conflict get a tutor who can be patient; explain the purpose of the activity to the child; and limit the time to reasonable sessions, a page at a time and a total session of 20 minutes being what I can manage at first.
Usually a pointer is enough (I use a pen, preferably with a silver end), but in one extreme case (a gifted boy who had reached Grade 4 with B’s as a total non-reader — but a great guesser and manipulator) I had to cut a rectangular bit out of the corner of a file card and use that as a moving window to frame each new word, because otherwise he jumped ahead and all around and guessed frantically.
I do not like the two-hands-and-a-ruler-under-the-line system; every kid I’ve met who used it immediately read better when I took the ruler away, since they had had all the attention on the ruler and none on the content, besides losing lines anyway and breaking sentences at the wrong places. Also the entire point is to *move* the eyes left to right to track, and the ruler sits still and prevents the hands from moving and pointing at the individual words so it breaks the rhythm and is often counterproductive.

When the child reads anything at all, whether in the tracking practice or in a workbook or elsewhere, if you hear an order reversal have the child look at the word again and sound it out left-to-right. At first this is annoying also, but very shortly the child suddenly realizes that the words are makeing sense for the first time and starts to self-correct.

Avoid pressure for reading speed. At this point it’s the worst thing you can do. Get it right first, then fast. I keep stressing that there’s no value in a fast mistake. You’ll just have to do it over again and end up much slower than before. Control, rhythm, comprehension; then speed comes easily.

It’s also a very good idea to reteach handwriting from the ground up, noting directionality (always top to bottom, left to right) and order. Developing a good writing rhythm, slow but steady at first and speeding up later, is a big help when you need to write at length in high school and college. The kinesthetic learning feeds back to the eyes.

Great post, Victoria…I just wanted to add one thought: Being a Davis Dyslexia Association member, I wanted to remind you that this little girl fits right into the typical ‘visual spatial’ dyslexic described by Ron Davis in ‘The Gift of Dyslexia’. His theory is that this ‘moving letter’ syndrome is a trick of perception that some people learn very young. They try to use their visual spatial talents of using their ‘mind’s eye’ to figure objects out 3 dimensionally. Works great on a tree or a cat, or in determining what is forest and what is trees — but can be a terrible handicap when trying to learn to read.

The result is much as Victoria described for the child who develops bad habits through suggestion. From talking to other parents, and adult dyslexics, I am pretty sure that these kids need vision training in many cases. Davis methods do address this, but not as a root cause, so I would still investigate the developmental vision exam.

DDAI is doing alot of research in LA schools on ‘dyslexia PREVENTION’ and it seems that solid training in the code, on a base of 3-d alphabet work (clay symbol mastery) and clay modeling for spelling/meaning of dolch words, plus TEACHING tracking and avoiding GUESSWORK results in…NO DYSLEXICS. So, Victoria’s prescription works for me…good luck with this student. In my opinion, teaching her that there IS a way and giving her the tools to find it will bring success.

Thanks so much for all your suggestions…The vision therapy sounds like a possible alternative…and oddly enough, I have another student in the same class who is about to undergo the same screenings that you suggested. Thanks for your thoughtful consideration!
Becky