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Ensure Reading Success

With

 Vantage Reading Programs

 

Do you feel completely comfortable when you hear that "boys mature a little later", or would you prefer to check into the following possibility? 

If the visual system is dysfunctional it causes poor spatial awareness. This in turn affects motor control, causing clumsiness with locomotion and manipulation.  Students with poor visual systems fail to pay attention visually. Their systems react in a more primitive and inefficient way causing flawed storage of facts in their memory systems.

 

Should a child be made to sit wiggling and working ineffectively in his seat, or should we pursue what may be a simple solution. 

What about the following possibility? 

If the visual system does not function efficiently visual attention is not secure. Working at near point - for example, seatwork at school - is extremely uncomfortable and young children can only stand this kind of stress for a short time.  This often leads educators to think the child has an attention deficit. Vantage Reading program ensures success.

 

 

Ask an optometrist to assess "near vision skills", and check into the following possibility. 

Copying from a textbook or worksheet to a notebook may be very difficult if a student has poor fixation skills or poor accommodation. Copying from a board is sometimes impossible because of the crystalline lens' inability to adjust to the different distances.

 

 

Should we keep saying, "Stay in and do it again?" and "Try harder", or might we consider the following? 

Writing or printing properly and neatly may be affected because eyes guide the hand in writing. With poor vision skills, students often print with awkward lettering.  They have difficulty keeping their work in between the lines on a page, and they are slow to complete work. 

 

For this most critical of school skills, can we afford to "give him time" when there may be the following possibility? 

Reading is affected the most by poor vision skills.  Students often have no accurate left to right eye movement, a skill necessary for reading books.  Words and even lines are skipped, words are misread, and students do not understand what they read. Because all school subjects depend heavily on reading, a student is in jeopardy even though he may have a normal intelligence. 

 

 

Is your child or a student having social problems and you don't really know why? 

Consider this. 

Behaviour difficulties arise because of reading and writing problems.  Teachers and parents often look for a psychological reason for poor work production and poor behaviour, while the cause may be near vision skills. Typical behaviours of students with poor near vision skills are: 

·distractibility, 

·avoidance of reading or writing, 

·indications of frustration, 

·excessive blinking and eye strain when working at close range, or "near point", 

·disruptive behaviours in class, aggressive behaviour in groups, 

·good attention to auditory learning, 

·distrust of adults who admonish them to work harder for succeed, and 

·poor social skills. 

 

 

Why can most children learn to read quickly and easily, but not your "Johnny"? 

From Kindergarten to Grade Three, students with Vision problems may: 

·fail to remember letter forms, 

·fail to remember simple three letter words, 

·use exaggerated auditory closure to read each word, 

·have trouble with spatial concepts on paper, 

·have poor visual attention, 

·have poor printing form and reversals persisting even up to Grade Three, 

·have work production slow down as grades get higher, and 

·fail to respond to remediation classes.

 

From Grades Four and up, students with Vision problems may: 

·fall behind their peers in reading by two to three years, 

·have their work production decrease markedly as school demands increase, and 

·show disruptive behaviour, day dreaming, behaviour excesses, and avoidance techniques.  They may proceed from tension relieving activities to intentional disruption.  Many students by Grade Six have hard-core behaviour problems. 

Focus 

Almost simultaneously with fixation, the eye adjusts its crystalline lens so that an object is clear, both at near point and at far point. Any dysfunction in this system causes blurring. 

Convergence 

Using your eyes to look at an object up close is very different from looking at an object that is far away.  When looking at an object up close, such as letters on a page, eye muscles must be able to work in partnership to pull the eyes in, or triangulate (convergence), so that the light still falls on the fovea in each eye.  If the eyes do not work together properly, you will have double vision.  In contrast, when looking at an object far away, eyes are parallel, and the eye muscles are relaxed.  Success at seeing something up close or far away is also linked to the performance of the eye lens.  When looking in the distance, eye muscles are relaxed.  When shifting to near point, the two medial rectus muscles make the visual axis converge or the two eyes triangulate.  When shifting to far point from near point the lateral muscle make the axes parallel.  Convergence and divergence are linked to lens performance.  The two systems aid each other in function.  Vision specialists refer to it as the AC/A ratio.  A normal AC/A ratio is 1/3.If the ratio is off it indicates a malfunction of one system.  Convergence must be held in position for all near point tasks or students may see double.  If accommodation does not hold at near point students may see a blur. 

Fusion 

If you close either eye, you can still see what you are looking at.  If each eye sees on its own, why don't we see two objects when we see something?  Our eyes are made to focus and aim with extreme accuracy, and with this precision, the brain processes the information into one single object.  This is called fusion. 

Fusion and Steriopsis 

When images fall close enough on the fovea of both eyes they have achieved fusion.  The object of the focal point is the same whether viewed by the right eye, the left eye, or both eyes.  Subtle differences are ignored or suppressed by the brain.  Eyes are placed geometrically in different positions.  The brain measures the disparity of difference, and from it constructs a three dimensional image.  This process provides us with depth perception.  This ability is mature at five months of age.  In fusion, subtle differences are ignored; in steriopsis the brain recognizes subtle differences.  Students who lack fusion and steriopsis cannot excel in sports that include fast moving flying objects, like balls or pucks.  They cannot judge velocity.  Instead they must rely on size perception, texture and perspective to judge distance.  Night driving is difficult because in the dark their perspective and texture markers are gone. 

Saccade Fixations 

During reading or scanning, eyes move in quick motions called saccades, but for very brief milli-seconds between these quick successive saccade movements, the eyes do not move.  This stop time is called a fixation.  When the eyes are fixating the vision system is partly responsible for storing pertinent information.  If you have slow saccade function the eye's ability to store information easily and well is altered.  As well, difficulties with reading fluency and comprehension appear.