OnTrack Reading

I’ve done a little revising of the section titled The Vision Piece today to draw more attention to a visual condition called Alternating Suppression. If you have a child who is struggling with reading, it’s possible that he’s experiencing this on a daily basis, so you should read about it to better understand what is going on as he reads.

As you read it, if you or your spouse avoided reading during the early years but now enjoy reading, you might find yourself wondering whether your brain successfully managed to adapt your visual skills, or if it was forced to take a less optimal route so that you could better enjoy close-up experiences like reading.

A note of comments: I have responded to everyone who’s ever left a comment in here (including removing the ubiquitous Spam) but frankly, comments have been sparse and I’m tempted to remove the opportunity to leave them. I had hoped that some discussion would develop in here, but I’ve come to realize that even though this site sees steady traffic, it’s not organized in a manner that makes it easy to follow any discussion that might develop.

So, if the comment box disappears at some point, that’s what happened. When I get to the point of redesigning the site with a more logical home page, I’ll try to set it up so that comments all appear in one location to see if that generates more discussion.

Anyway, here’s the revised Page on Alternating Suppression.

Hi,

I see that one of your members has posted a link here. I would put this information on your board if I get signed up, but for now it appears the information that is most relevant to your current discussion is a program I’ve written up called the Junior High Phonics Course.

You can get to it from the link above or by scanning down the sidebar of this site. Some of you might also find the information on vision skills interesting. It’s my belief that kids who fail to learn to read in spite of having access to a good phonics program are usually suffering from undiagnosed and untreated vision issues.

I’ve been slow in posting lately as I’ve been trying to get my Advanced Code Workbook restructured as a printable file so I can possibly make it available on-line from an on-demand publisher. It’s been a long project.

I finally managed to put together a Page discussing the Convergence Insufficiency Study that was published in January of 2005.

There you will find a link to the complete article describing the study, as well as a link to a very useful questionnaire used to determine if your child has the symptoms of convergence insufficiency. I’ve also linked to the three charts of results that were obtained in the study so you don’t have to plow through the whole thing yourself.

The study appears to have been well designed and is, I believe, part of a larger study being done at several locations to determine whether convergence insufficiency is best treated by vision therapy. What is particularly impressive is that the article was published in the Archives of Ophthalmology in spite of the Academy of Ophthalmology’s longstanding policy statement opposing vision therapy as a viable treatment. This is, in some sense, progress. Maybe someday everybody will get on the same page with all this and we can start to catch all the children that are currently being missed.

Again, the study is discussed on the Page Convergence Insufficiency Study

Growing an Architect lays out my thoughts on why a child who grows up with a problem with binocular vision skills might just be predisposed to become an architect. It certainly appears, if you read enough websites, that children who struggle with reading have a tendency, if they succeed in getting through school, to become architects, draftsmen, or to work in some similar capacity.

The key is that they get through school successfully enough that they want to go on to college or vocational school to hone skills that they have already unconsciously developed. I write this in the hope that reading it will encourage you, as a parent of a struggling reader, to look on the bright side and realize that your child is developing some visual skills that other children are not. Knowing this might enable you to look on his future with optimism, even though the past few years might have been a real struggle for you and your child.

It’s still vitally important that you address your child’s potential vision problems, but I believe it is also true that the compensating skills he’s been forced to build might be exceptionally useful in the future. So with that in mind, here are my thoughts on Growing an Architect.

Convergence Insufficiency describes one of the main vision problems that, in my opinion, cause children (and some adults) to struggle with reading.

The ability to converge your eyes at nearpoint is just that, an ability, i.e., a developed skill. For one reason or another some children don’t develop that skill at all, or they don’t develop it on schedule.

Educators who are pushing the teaching of reading down into kindergartens across the country are implicitly assuming, usually without even realizing they are doing so, that all five year olds have fully developed convergence ability. But they don’t. Some will develop the skill during kindergarten, some during first grade and some never will develop it.

Every experienced first grade teacher in the country has probably, at some point, assured worried parents not to be concerned yet because often it will all “just click” and a child will finally start to pick up on reading sometime in first grade. In my opinion, what “clicked” is that those children finally developed the ability to converge both eyes on a close object and sustain the effort for a sufficient time to concentrate on print.

Bear in mind that I am not an optometrist, so some of this might be off a bit, but with that in mind, take a look at today’s addition to the Guide, Convergence Insufficiency.

Today’s entry, Tracking Tip, goes into the Tidbits section of the Guide.

I’ve recently noticed that children can go through vision therapy but still retain bad habits that keep them from utilizing their newly-acquired skills. The reason this is in the Tidbits section is that it will probably only work if your child has had vision therapy already, or is not in need of vision therapy, but just tracks print inefficiently by turning his whole head as he scans a line of print.

Nevertheless, I’ve seen pronounced improvements in fluency and also reductions in careless reading when I convince a child to scan print with his eyes alone.

For the details, see Tracking Tip.

If your child’s school has done a vision test and told you that his or her vision is fine, or even if your family optometrist has done so, but your child is struggling to learn to read, do not merely assume that your child’s reading problems lie elsewhere. The Page added to the Guide today is Vision Assessment Checklist and it contains a link to a checklist that will get you started on assessing the possibility that a vision problem is causing your child to struggle.

The checklist, developed after experience with dozens of clients of OnTrack Reading, helps me decide whether to refer parents to a developmental optometrist for a vision evaluation. I’ve already made it clear elsewhere on this website how important I believe vision skills are to reading, and the checklist should help you determine whether your child’s vision should be a concern.

To obtain it go to the Page titled Vision Assessment Checklist

If your child struggles with reading, it’s likely that he has some difficulty seeing patterns that crop up in words. As I’ve discussed many times in here already, it’s also likely that your child has a vision problem that might have gone undiagnosed, particularly if others in the family experienced problems learning to read.

Today, I’ve added to the Guide on the sidebar the Page Adding Suffixes to Split Vowels, which has three worksheets you can download that will help your child locate one of the key patterns present in multisyllable words.

These worksheets lay the groundwork for understanding why we use so many doubled consonant spellings in English words, a topic that will be covered next. That, in turn, will prepare your child to understand one of the key exceptions utilized in the OnTrack Reading approach to decoding unfamiliar multisyllable words.

I’m sort of backing into the Advanced Code Workbook as I build this site, because I’ve started at the multisyllable level and then have been adding pieces essential to decoding at the multisyllable level. This will have a couple of advantages to you as a reader of the information contained here. First, your child might be doing just fine but you have some concern about the curriculum you’re using for multisyllable instruction. You will find here a method that appeals to virtually every child I’ve taught, and one that is easily understood by both parent and child. It will lead rapidly to independent decoding of three, four, five and even six syllable words.

The second advantage is that if you happen to be a teacher of, say, sixth or seventh grade students who notices that your class has a lot of trouble with the grade level reading, you will find that a few minutes of class time per day devoted to teaching the OnTrack Reading method of attacking unfamiliar multisyllable words will pay huge dividends. Granted, I’m speculating, because no one has tested this on a full class of older students before, but if you read over the information here, some of you will see that all of this should be quite easy to teach to your students in a limited time.

Anyway, here’s Adding Suffixes to Split Vowels.

Due to a question posed by a friend on another website, I decided to start writing The Vision Piece of the puzzle today.

In it, I go over how the average parent ends up under the impression that they’ve already had their child’s vision thoroughly evaluated when, actually, if your family has a history of reading problems, vision issues should always be suspected as a primary factor. It’s tempting to try to assign blame in situations where important problems get missed, but usually the truth is that some combination of ignorance and inertia are really behind it. We can’t know everything about everything and we tend to keep doing things the way we’ve always done them.

It would be helpful if someone reading this who has had an experience similar to what I describe in The Vision Piece would take the time to add a comment, so that other readers can see how easy it is to rule out a vision problem prematurely. Or, feel free to ask a question, since sometimes that will help me determine what to focus on for the next addition to the Guide.

Dyslexia Remains a Puzzle is the title of the last Page of The Dyslexia Puzzle . And it does remain a puzzle, at least to me.

I had a parent tell me recently that she hoped that vision therapy would be the miracle cure for her child’s reading problem. And, in the sense that she means it, vision therapy just might be the miracle she’s been looking for. What I’ve tried to make clear is that dyslexia runs in families, that it probably is accompanied by vision problems that first need to be diagnosed and then need to be addressed, usually with vision therapy, and that then some children still need to be taught phonics. And, as I state in Dyslexia Remains a Puzzle, sometimes neither of these is sufficient, though both might have been necessary.

Dyslexia tends to be the sort of problem that draws parents who want miracles and practitioners who claim to be able to provide those miracles. If it were that simple, we’d have figured out exactly which miracle worker was correct by now, and all the rest would be considered charlatans, just out for the money. It is more reasonable to assume that dyslexia is a puzzle, that figuring out the puzzle is a matter of prioritizing, and that miracles don’t often happen.

One of the problems with the miracle worker approach is that each discipline claims to know the answer. This results in each discipline subtly, or not so subtly, disparaging the competition. Phonics instructors, convinced that every child not reading simply needs a good phonics course, can be heard claiming that vision therapy is not effective. Convinced that all reading problems have visual roots, some developmental optometrists might prescribe vision therapy without bothering to see if a child is hopelessly confused about phonics.

Similarly, advocates of dozens of other approaches can be heard claiming that they have the answer, which a desperate but hopeful parent hears as the miracle cure. Vision therapy and effective phonics instruction are pieces of the puzzle, but if you read Dyslexia Remains a Puzzle, you’ll see that I believe there’s sometimes more to the puzzle.

By the way, I’ve added a link to ReadNOW on the sidebar under Blogroll. This is a site on Yahoo Groups that has longstanding contributors some of whom are quite knowledgeable about other programs that might be useful if your child’s vision is fine, but he is still struggling with reading.