Dr. Charron's Blog

Learning To Read & Reading To Learn – Part 2

drpetercharron — Fri, 03 May 2013 22:19:49 +0000

Imagine you are in the 3rd grade and when it comes to reading, you just cannot keep up. You breezed through phonics, you can bark out some of the largest, longest words in your class, you even spell pretty well. The problem is, you can’t remember a thing about what you just read. The teacher says it’s poor reading comprehension! What could be going on? Are you just slower than the other kids? Do you have dyslexia? Do you have Attention Deficit Disorder?? Is it a hearing problem? A vision problem?

Well, you just passed the school vision screening with flying colors; the nurse said you have 20/20 vision! Great, you can check vision off the list!

Or can you?

When you sit down to read, all the words are pretty clear for the first few minutes, but shortly after, they seem to get blurry, and they sort of swim around and float on the page. Surely this is normal. You don’t think to tell your parents, or your teacher. They’ll probably tell you your just not focusing.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of kids in every city in America who have 20/20 vision but cannot use their eyes properly when they read. As a result, the print goes double, it gets blurry, it moves, it dances, it swims. The kids do not tell their parents because they think it’s normal. They just know that when they sit down to read, it’s not much fun. They don’t know that it interferes with their comprehension of what they read.

When kids look inside a book and the text looks double, or fuzzy, it is usually due to an eye focusing disorder or an eye teaming disorder. Here’s how it works.

When many kids (or many people for that matter) read, they will be viewing a book at about 15 inches from their eyes. As they read, their eyes should be focused at a 15 inch distance to ensure that the text is clear. The people with an eye focusing disorder will focus their eyes for 12 inches one minute, 20 inches the next, 23 inches the next, 7 inches the next, and so on. Eventually they get lucky and their eyes focus correctly at 15 inches, but it only lasts a second or two. During this whole time, the text blurry, clear, blurry, then clear. Over an over again! When their eyes behave in this manner, it is called an eye focusing disorder (accommodative dysfunction). Imagine trying to read for longer than 30 seconds, and then try to comprehend what you’ve read!

Accommodative dysfunction affects the way the reading text looks and can often be the root cause of reading problems. It can be associated with headaches, eyestrain, tired eyes, difficulty copying from the board, blurry vision, and poor reading comprehension. It is tragically under-diagnosed because it is often the last problem evaluated when a child struggles in school.

It is easily cured with 15-20 weeks of vision therapy.

Learning To Read & Reading To Learn

drpetercharron — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:15:10 +0000

There’s an old expression that says from first to second grade, children learn to read and from third grade onward, they read to learn. In the early grades, children are learning the look of the letters and the sound of the letters. Then they learn the look and sounds of the whole words. Somewhere around grade 3, the demands placed on the students shift. They will be expected to read for meaning and comprehension. The reading struggles in either stage can often be caused by attention problems, focusing problems, dyslexia, learning disability, speech/language disorders, and vision disorders. In many kids, a combination of these problems will contribute to the reading problems but the vision portion can will often play a huge role.

Let’s consider the visual demands for the first stage: learning to read.

Visual Discrimination:

When learning to read, the skill of visual discrimination should be developed. This means that the child should be able to recognize subtle similarities and differences in the way things look. If this skill is poor, a “k” could easily be confused with a “x”. A “p” could easily be confused with a “q”, and “Many” for “Mary”

Visual Memory:

Children recognize words based on what they looked like before. The child remembers how it looked in the past. When children struggle to remember the look of the word, they will often read it once accurately. Moments later, they may look at it again and act as if they’ve never seen it before. The visual memory is of course, related to the visual discrimination skill mentioned above.

Ocular Motor Control (Eye Aiming/Tracking):

In the early grades, the print is large and the spacing is wide. The skill of moving the eyes to the correct spot on the page isn’t as critical as it is when the text is small and cluttered. However, the children who are learning phonics are expected to dissect the individual parts of the words which requires precise control of the eyes and careful viewing. When this skill isn’t developed, the child will often have to use his finger to tell him where to look.

These are just a few of the the factors that can contribute to problems with learning to read. They are not addressed with vision screenings and will often require a thorough eye exam or developmental vision evaluation. In the next segment, we’ll discuss the vision problems which can impact reading to learn.

The Readalyzer

drpetercharron — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 08:04:20 +0000

We have been using this handy little diagnostic device in our office for about one year now. The Readalyzer is a set of high tech goggles placed over your eyes to tell us what your eyes do while reading. The device tells us about your reading speed and comprehension but it also reveals other more important findings. It helps us determine if poor eye movement control is contributing to your reading struggles.

Do you skip over certain words when reading? Do you skip over whole lines in the text? Do you lose your place? Do you back track and read the same thing twice or three times? Do your eyes stop for an excessively long time when looking at a certain word? While tested with the Readalyzer, sensors inside the goggles can capture and record all this information while reading through a paragraph or even a longer story of three to four pages.

How it works: After we perform an eye exam, we’ll use the Readalyzer as part of our visual functional testing. The doctor will select an age appropriate passage for the patient to read. The patient silently reads the passage and answers ten questions about the text. Immediately after, we can print out results that help us see if the patient’s eye movements are contributing to reading problems.