Maybe you’re planning vacations, summer camps, or perhaps thinking about tutoring programs to give your child an academic head start. In either case, remember to add “getting an eye exam” to your list of summer plans for your children.
This is because 80% of learning is visual. And even if your child sees 20/20, there may still be an underlying visual efficiency problem. For instance, he/she may be a slow reader, skip words/lines when reading, or cannot read for more than 15 minutes without losing attention or headaches. Also, children who reverse letters, confuse similar looking words or struggle to remember how to spell could have a visual perceptual disorder that leads to poor performance in school. Sometimes, these children get mislabelled as having an attention deficit disorder AD(H)D.
The summer is an excellent time to prepare your child for the next school year. In addition to tutoring in reading and math, Vision Therapy helps to improve your child’s academic skills and attention span. Vision Therapy is a set of customized exercise and therapy program to improve visual skills. Learning-related visual problems affect more than 50% of our children. Most times, these problems are undetected unless the child has specialized testing by a Developmental Optometrist who specializes in these areas.
Consider having your child examined early to find out if any developmental vision delays are blocking your child’s performance in school. For more information, go to www.visiontherapycalgary.com or www.covd.org
