Would anyone mind sharing their experience of visual processing disorders please.
my reception daughter was complaining about the contrasts with the white board at school so we tried different seating positions none of which helped. I kept thinking we would see how it went but then started to notice problems with her reading, well not problems so much as inconsistencies. She reads very hard books at home and some school ones which were in the wrong boxes but she read them fine, the standard biff and co ones she had problems with. Not because she doesn't know the words but just missing words out, rearranging the sentances etc. I then started looking into it more and discovered that the ones she reads very well are either bigger font or printed on coloured backgrounds so started reading up on it and spoke to her teacher and optician (who retested her eyes and sight is fine) and decided to try a local Visual Therapy place the school recommended. They tested her with the colourimeter machine and there was a big improvement with a coloured tint. the first time she read it was slow, skipping words, skipping lines all over the place. the second time was confident, faster and only skipped one line. Obviously this would indicate some sort of problem even if it isn't anything you can diagnose officially but it does mean we need to help her work with it.
We have ordered her tinted glasses (an overlay obviously couldn't help with the white board or writing) to try. The place also said it is possible to do an eye tracking test (?) and then based on results of that we could sign up to a 5 week course of exercises to try and help her learn to control her eyes a bit more.
Does anyone have any experience or advice please? Obviously we, and her teacher, want to help her as much as possible but we aren't sure where to start. She is reading well because she picked it up at the age of 3 so at 5 she is on level 7 at school, reads level 9 or 10 vocab happily but reads purely on whole word recognition. she CAN spell out words phonetically but it exhausts her eyes very quickly and luckily she seems to know all the vocab up to literally level 9/10 books in the boxes and most general childrens story books. Obviously as time goes on she can't learn every word however good her memory is and we need to help her work out a way to spell the words out when she actually doesn't see some of the letters.
TIA
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Visual Processing Disorders/skipping words and lines - experiences please
16 replies
Periwinkle007 · 26/03/2013 11:54
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