OnTrack Reading

Today’s addition to the guide is What About the Adults? If you’re here because you’re concerned about one of your children struggling to learn to read, and if you yourself went through that same struggle, then it’s likely that your family is carrying what I’ve called the dyslexia gene. It’s also quite likely that you would be a candidate for vision therapy in the sense that some of your visual skills are probably poorly developed. But if you’re already reading comfortably now, you’ll see that I’m of a mind that you needn’t worry. Remember though, that you might want to take action to prevent one or more of your children, or your grandchildren, from having to go through school with a vision problem. It wasn’t fun, was it?

And if you don’t like to read, I’d recommend that you find a developmental optometrist, provided you’d be willing to undergo vision therapy if the testing indicates the existence of a problem. If you’re not willing, why bother spending the money just to learn that you’ve got the problem?

On the off chance that you’re reading this from a jail cell, getting the proper assessment and following it up with vision therapy is going to be quite a challenge. However, it might be what you need to enable you to straighten out your life. In fact, in your case you might want to consider at least getting the proper evaluation done, because learning that there’s always been a physical reason for your lifelong difficulties might make it easier to change direction in your life, even if you’re unable to undergo vision therapy.

To better understand my sudden reference to inmates, please read What About the Adults?.

Today’s addition to the Guide’s Pages is Help for Fourth Grade and Up. There, I discuss some of the complicating factors presented by an older child who still struggles with reading.

In my opinion, which is heavily based on my experience working with many children whom most would consider dyslexic, a younger child coming from a family with a history of reading problems usually has a vision problem that should be addressed and that should be the priority. I’ve found, however, that older children present other issues and that sometimes vision therapy isn’t the answer, even though it might have been when the child was in the early grades.

While the decision to address fourth graders differently than third graders was somewhat arbitrary, this is about the age that the child has finally adjusted to the fact that he reads more poorly than his peers, and has decided how he’s going to handle the situation. Your third grader might seem more like the older children I describe in this section, or your fifth grader might seem more like the third graders I discussed earlier.

Help for Fourth Grade and Up

If your child is finishing up kindergarten, first or second grade soon, you no doubt know whether or not all is well with reading. If you’ve read the collection of Pages on The Dyslexia Puzzle this far, you also have a pretty good idea whether dyslexia, as I’ve interpreted it, is an issue in your family and with any particular child of yours.

As the Page added today, First to Third Grade Help, explains, it’s not too late to take action to address your child’s reading problem, but time is of the essence. The sooner you get going, the better, because the longer your child struggles with an undiagnosed vision problem the more traumatic the experience. So take a look at First to Third Grade Help for some recommendations.

A Note on Comments

I would like to encourage visitors with vision therapy experience to comment. Yesterday was the first day that I told a few people whom I respect deeply when it comes to reading instruction about the existence of this website, and I see that I’ve had a few visitors. I’m well aware that some of my visitors also view vision therapy as an important factor in dealing with reading problems, and some others might even have sent a child through vision therapy and experienced a range of outcomes from satisfactory to disappointing.

I don’t intend this site to be a place to debate the merits of vision therapy, although I will, in time, provide research references that shed light on both sides of the debate. I’m allowing comments to be posted on the home page without requiring they be approved before posting, but I’ll consider removing those which attempt to turn this site into a debating forum on the efficacy of vision therapy unless the persons opposed to vision therapy are presenting for discussion citations of specific research which supports their view. If you have had a bad personal experience with vision therapy, I’ll certainly consider allowing your comment to remain since we need to hear the downside, as well as the upside, though I reserve the right to edit out obscenities, disrespectful language, etc.

So, please add a comment, especially if you have an experience to share. Eventually I will set aside a spot on the site where collections of good and not-so-good experiences can be read by parents facing the same dilemma many of you did. Just be aware that I probably won’t always have time to answer specific questions raised, although possibly another visitor might be willing to help.

The next Page being added today, Helping Your Preschool Child, gives you suggestions for seeing that your potentially dyslexic child gets off to a good start in reading. You want your preschooler to appreciate books and the enjoyment they bring. But you also want to avoid putting him or her into situations where bad habits are learned or frustration is experienced.

Handled correctly, your child’s preschool days should be as enjoyable as any other child’s. But if you make the mistake of expecting your child to learn to read before a vision problem has been properly diagnosed and remedied, you run the risk of frustrating him, rather than educating him.

Young children should be exposed to books and the excellent stories they bear, and they should be encouraged to delve into the details of print as they become able, and when they show personal interest in doing so. And caring parents and grandparents should not hesitate to provide clues to how print works in attempts to generate interest in the printed word on the page.

But if dyslexia runs in the family, you need to be alert to the signs that the particular preschooler sitting in your lap might be visually confused by what he sees and might not have a clue what you’re trying to show him when you start trying to explain that letters represent sounds. Don’t make the mistake of forcing reading instruction on a child who isn’t ready. Instead, prepare to take the necessary steps that should be taken so that his formal introduction to learning to read has the best chance of being an enjoyable experience.

For my thoughts on how to do that, read Helping Your Preschool Child.

I didn’t look forward to writing this addition to The Dyslexia Puzzle, but Traumatic First Years of School had to be written.

I’ve worked with nearly 200 children one-on-one over the past ten years and in almost all cases I’ve had a concerned parent in the room or nearby learning what I do so that they can help their child learn the lessons I introduce in my phonics course and also guide their child’s reading after I’ve finished the OnTrack Reading curriculum with them.

During that time I’ve heard numerous stories of what the children I’ve worked with have experienced while attempting to learn to read, unsuccessfully, in school. The picture isn’t pretty, even in the best schools, because learning to read is the most important task expected of your child in the early years of school. Failing at it can’t help but have consequences.

And remember, I’m generally working with paying clients, that is with children whose parents are paying me. I don’t see the children whose parents either don’t care about, or are unaware of, or can’t afford to correct, their child’s reading problem. Yet even in this subset of children with obviously caring parents I have heard many stories of frustration, and have seen many children manifest behaviors that could only have been caused by being subjected to nearly unbearable pressures, all due to their inability to learn to read.

And, I have to admit that before I learned how necessary it is to have efficient, functioning visual skills in place before learning to read, I no doubt was a source of some of their trauma, despite my best intentions to help them learn to read.

It’s not pleasurable reading, but here’s Traumatic First Years of School.

Today’s addition to The Dyslexia Puzzle is Can Dyslexia Just Disappear?

The short answer is yes, it can, in the sense that the symptoms disappear. But it’s important that you understand how that can happen and that you properly assess the risk that your child carries what I have been calling the dyslexia gene.

Why is that? Simple. While your child might now be out of the woods, so to speak, and you feel justifiably relieved, you have to remember that any future children, or younger ones you already have, might go down the same route if dyslexia does run in your family.

If you have a small family or are fortunate enough to have all of your children get through childhood without further reading problems, you still need to be alert to the possibility that your eventual grandchildren might be dyslexic.

I don’t say this to alarm you, but rather to prepare you to be ready to take what I believe can be very effective measures at an early enough age to prevent your children and grandchildren from ever having to experience significant reading failure.

Please read Can Dyslexia Just Disappear?

If your child is struggling with reading, someone, somewhere, is likely to claim that your child is dyslexic. I would probably agree, but after you read the Page I’ve added today titled My Take on Dyslexia perhaps you’ll feel like there’s a possibility that you can finally do something that addresses the situation.

I’ll say at the outset that there are no quick, cheap and easy answers and that the final result might not be what you desire. But I have seen many children finally turn on to reading in a way that I know will prove to be a lasting development in their lives, and I know what their parents had to do to make it happen.

In a better world, we would catch children earlier and devote sufficient resources to ensure that most of them never have to undergo the harrowing experience of being one of the kids in the room who just doesn’t get it. In time, I hope this site is even able to contribute something to force movement in that direction.

For now though, as a parent of a struggling reader, you’re pretty much on your own. There are lots of people willing to offer help, but very few of them will solve your child’s problem.

So, take a look at My Take on Dyslexia.

Today I’m starting a series of Pages under the heading The Dyslexia Puzzle.

I won’t be coming at dyslexia from a medical point of view, so I won’t be burying you in medical terminology, types of testing, varying diagnoses, etc. Instead, I will be discussing dyslexia in practical terms as an instructor. I’ll be describing what I see in a client base that consists primarily of children who read poorly enough that most would be considered dyslexic, and I’ll be describing what I’ve found to work for many of my clients.

The first Page just summarizes the issue of dyslexia. In the next one I’ll try to describe what I see as a dyslexic child and help you determine whether your child fits the description.

For now, take a look at The Dyslexia Puzzle.

Today’s I conclude The OnTrack Reading Story on this site with a page titled Reconciling the Research Conflict.

My early indoctrination, and it was very nearly an indoctrination, into teaching methods for reading came from sources that emphasized phonics instruction. This was a clear backlash against the Whole Language methods that had taken over many classrooms including, by law, all of the classrooms of the state of California, in the last couple of decades of the Twentieth Century.

By the time I’d brought myself up to speed on the controversy I was nearly completely convinced that most reading problems were then being generated by inadequate, or wholly missing, phonics instruction in our classrooms. This is one of the side effects of wars, including the reading war of the time. People tend to choose sides. Unfortunately, vision problems weren’t even on the main battlefield of ideas.

Oh, the developmental optometrists along with a small subset of researchers in schools of optometry were publishing all right, but the main battle was Whole Language versus Phonics, and that battle drowned everyone else out. And I was right in the thick of the main battle, in the sense that all of my attention was drawn to it.

It was only through a fortuitous combination of events that I learned to appreciate the role of vision problems in generating poor readers, and possibly even underlying dyslexia. My Phono-Graphix trainers warned that some kids like that existed and even suggested that we find a reputable vision therapy department. But it was truly a fluke that the only developmental optometrist within 100 miles of my office was in the same city as my office. And it was an even bigger fluke that we ran into each other. And what if David had not appeared? After all, I’d worked with several children before David without suspecting vision problems (some of whose parents I later called back to explain the possibility that we might have overlooked a vision issue, by the way.)

So, if you’re convinced that it’s all phonics and auditory issues, I’m here to tell you “been there, done that.” The page I’ve added today details the lengths to which I went after I started to question my initial assumptions, which I now believe to have been wrong, so take a look at Reconciling the Research Conflict.

I’ve added the rest of the description of my experience with David today under the heading David Returns.

In a way, I wish all children with vision-based reading problems would manifest the many symptoms of a vision problem that David did, but that is hardly ever the case. As I’ve said elsewhere, I now believe all children who are struggling to learn to read in first grade should be seen by a developmental optometrist to at least rule out the possibility that a vision problem exists. Rarely will a child exhibit symptoms as obvious as David’s, and remember, even then it took several years for his parents to get him the proper treatment.

In the early days of my exposure to vision therapy and to parents of children who had successfully undergone vision therapy one question was prominent among the mothers. It was “Why is this stuff such a secret?” Back then, they had known something was wrong, but could find nobody who could tell them what it was.

If you have a child who struggles with reading, you’ve heard many other explanations for the problem, including being lazy, not smart enough, not ready to learn yet, not having enough support at home, etc., but hardly anyone will mention that it might be a vision problem. And if they do, the odds are overwhelming that you will be reassured by an optometrist that your child’s vision issues can be addressed with glasses, or that there is nothing wrong with it.

There are many reasons for the situation being as it is, and I will spend considerable time discussing them as this site is developed. For now, it must be frustrating to be reading this and only know of one vision therapy department which is probably half a country, or even a continent, away.

So, here is a link to the College of Optometrists in Vision Development, or COVD. Members of this organization are developmental optometrists trained to assess and treat, or refer for treatment, the sort of vision problems I’ve been discussing here. Because I have no first-hand knowledge of their operations and personnel, I cannot personally vouch for any of them except, of course, the Vision Therapy Academy in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I’ll eventually have something to say about doing proper investigation before selecting a vision therapy department, but for now you might want to do some additional digging on the COVD website. They have a Find a Doctor button on the bar near the top which will help you determine whether there is a developmental optometrist near you. I’ve also placed the link to the COVD website on the sidebar.

Meanwhile, you can read the rest of David’s story under David Returns.