Raising Smarter Children

 

Adding on to yesterday’s message about inadequate school vision screenings, here are 16 essential skills that eye doctors say your child needs to perform everyday classroom tasks, like reading, copying writing, P.E., using computers and taking notes…

Kids need strong visual skills to succeed in school. 

These skills are so important, that if even one is missing, or weak, it can hamper your child’s success, cause serious stress issues, and cause you needless worry about your child, all because no one ever mentioned these skills are or what they mean.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk more about the effects if these skills are weak or and how to strengthen them. 

16 Visual Skills Essential To Your Child’s School Success

Plus.. What Happens To Your Child If These Skills Are Weak

 1. Visual acuity - the ability to see clearly and both near and far distances.

When it’s weak… If your child doesn’t have good visual acuity, they may have difficulty copying from the board or overhead, will not do well in sports, and have trouble reading and copying from the book to the paper as well.

2. Tracking – the ability to move the eyes smoothly from line to line and not lose place. 

When it’s weak:  Kids and adults who have poor tracking skills lose their place when reading, and often use their finger or a marker to keep their place.  It really slows reading down.

3.  Eye teaming- (binocularity) the ability for the eyes to work together as a team (without one eye wandering off, turning inward or outward), and the ability to sustain alignment close up and on things far away. 

When it’s weak… Kids with eye-teaming problems may have a tendency for the eyes to drift outward or inward.  They’ll get tired easily, and a great give away, is when you see them covering one eye while reading.

4. Eye teaming – also includes the ability of the eyes to work together and sustain alignment, and sustain alignment at both near and far distances.  

When it’s weak… Kids with eye teaming problems have a tendency for the eyes to drift outward or inward.  They will tire easily when reading and a great clue is when you see them covering one eye while reading.  They are trying to make the print look better.

5. Focusing – the ability to simultaneously focus the eyes on things close up and far away, then back and forth without any blurring or discomfort. 

When it’s weak… If your child has a focusing problem they will have trouble copying from the board, a book or overhead projector, and may want to work too closely to the paper or book.

6. Focusing – the ability to simultaneously focus the eyes on things far away

7. Focus – the ability of the eyes to sustain focus at near

8.  Focus – the ability of the eyes to sustain focus at far

When these three are weak… you’ll see kids acting out, not wanting to read, get tired easily and say they don’t like to read.

9. Eye-hand coordination and visual motor integration – the ability to use the hands and eyes together, monitor and direct the hands in order to do things like write, play, use computers, etc.

When it’s weak… These kids have very poor pencil grip, causing lots of stress up the arm and in the neck, handwiring with poor spacing between the letters, writing uphill or downhill and have very poor posture.

10. Peripheral vision – the ability to focus on one point, like a letter, and still see things around it.  This is important during reading, playing, riding a bike, using a computer, etc.

When it’s weak… your child’s personal safety is involved with poor peripheral vision.  It also hinders them as they read, trying much to hard to smoothly move the eyes from one word to the next.

11. Directionality – the ability to know right, left, up, down, etc.  In English, we read from left to right, so directionality is important. 

When it’s weak… This directly affects the ability to read from left to right,  to make meaning out of letters and words, playtime, note taking, etc.

12. Form perception – the ability to see forms and interpret them, recreate or copy them.  This allows your child to discriminate between likenesses and differences.

When it’s weak… If your child can’t do this accurately, he can’t be expected to perceive letters, words or sentences accurately, let alone make meaning from what he sees.  Your child may also reverse letters or whole words,  You can quickly test for form perception by making circles, squares, triangles, ovals, and more complex shapes and have your child copy them.  Watch carefully for any inaccuracies.

13. Visual Memory – the ability to recall things as a visual image.  That image may be symbols that make up a word, or what the word depicts. 

When it’s weak.. Your child can’t learn to read or write without good visual memory.

14. Figure ground.  Imagine you are looking at someone.  You need to be able to separate that person, from the background behind them, and the foreground in front of them. 

When it’s weak… Kids who don’t have strong figure ground skills are clumsy, bump into things easily and can’t read for long periods of time.

15. Visual Closure.  If you want your child to be able to tell the difference between a C and an O, or between words like that and what, they need visual closure skills. 

When it’s weak… Some kids shut off the information to the brain and miss whole sections of tests, saying they did not see them ( and it’s true), plus it causes serious reading and writing problems if visual closure skills aren’t strong.

16. Visualization. This is the ability to see things in the mind’s eye.  A lot of people take this one for granted, but don’t with your child. 

When it’s weak… It affects their thinking abilities and memory.  You may tell your child to visualize, but this is not the same as showing them how. (In another post, I’ll show you how to do this)…

There’s a great kit from several eye doctors, called I Read I Succeed  which helps strengthen all of these skills.  You may want to have your child take the Eye-Q Reading Inventory on that same page.