OnTrack Reading

If your child is going to be in first, second or third grade next school year and if you’re beginning to wonder, or already realize, that he or she shows symptoms of dyslexia, your very next order of business should be to find a developmental optometrist in your area and get your child evaluated.

If you’re the concerned parent of a child struggling with reading, by now you’ve been to either your family optometrist or even an ophthalmologist for a complete vision work-up and have been told that your child’s vision is fine, although glasses might have been prescribed to correct an acuity problem. This is typical. I won’t make any friends in the optometric or medical community with this next statement, but here it is anyway.

If your child is struggling with reading and you realize there’s a family history of such struggling, the odds are overwhelming that your child’s eyes aren’t fine. By the time he’s in second grade, his visual system is probably the main reason he’s struggling with reading, and with math too, for that matter. This is particularly true if you’ve conscientiously attempted to make sure that he’s getting a reasonable exposure to a phonics curriculum.

Based on personal experience with a large number of clients in this age range, I believe that there is a reasonably high chance that your child needs vision therapy.

Vision Therapy Isn’t Popular for Several Reasons

Here’s the downside of my recommendation. First, vision therapy is expensive and rarely covered by insurance although insurance sometimes will cover the initial examination, so at least you can learn whether a problem exists or not. Second, vision therapy isn’t convenient. It’s sometimes difficult to find a competent vision therapy department nearby and if your child undergoes vision therapy, you’ll be spending a lot of time traveling and working at home with him doing therapy exercises. It’s routine for parents to travel fifty miles or more to get to the Vision Therapy Academy in La Crosse, where I have my reading tutoring office. Third, you’ll get very little support from other medical professionals. Vision therapy is a controversial subject in the medical literature yet, although I feel certain this will change over the next several years. And finally, after all the time and expense, vision therapy might not be the answer, or at least the entire answer, and you will be left wondering whether it was time and money wasted, although most parents do see obvious changes in their child’s behavior following vision therapy even if reading progress remains disappointing.

The main reason the OnTrack Reading website exists is because parents need to hear from an informed third party that vision therapy is the answer for a large percentage of children who struggle with reading. And that includes the children who learned to read, but who get headaches or are otherwise stressed when they read, so they avoid it as much as possible. I have seen vision therapy help a great many children over the past five years and parents of struggling readers need to know of its potential benefits

Recommendations by Grade

Here’s what I tell the parents of first graders: If vision therapy is indicated and completed, your child’s classroom teacher will probably succeed in teaching your child to read. After all, most first graders learn to read when there’s a competent teacher in the room. Once your child’s vision skills are in place (and we are talking about skills here, not just acuity) the teacher should find an able learner has replaced a resistant one.

Parents of second graders get a slightly different recommendation: If vision therapy is indicated and completed, your child’s teacher might succeed in teaching your child to read, but that can sometimes depend on the teacher taking extra time to help your child catch up and also on being willing to reassess previous assumptions about your child’s work ethic, classroom behavior and overall abilities. By second grade, your child might have become withdrawn if easily subdued, or belligerent if not so easily subdued, with a wide range of possibilities in between. Getting past all that can be a challenge. Even your own working relationship with your child might also have suffered by that time, especially if you’ve been doing everything you could think of to address the situation up to now. In these cases, sometimes it’s better to have someone other than you or your child’s teacher work with your child for a while. It’s perfectly reasonable in cases like this to wait a bit and see if your child’s reading ability starts to improve rapidly following vision therapy, as it should if he gets appropriate instruction and if deficient visual skills were the main impediment.

By third grade, things get a little tougher. Third graders will have established some interesting compensating mechanisms as they struggled through the first years of school failing to learn to read. Also, by third grade your child is leaving the “learning to read” phase of schooling and entering the “reading to learn” phase, so he won’t get a lot of basic reading instruction in the regular classroom. And, unless your school is exceptional, he won’t get much phonics help outside the regular classroom either. The main reason the LD teacher won’t be trying to teach your child phonics by that time is because, if phonics was ever in the curriculum in the first place, it will have been abandoned by the time your child is in third grade. Why? Because it was tried on him and he didn’t learn to read.

Vision Therapy First, Then Phonics

You can probably see a pattern here. What I’m saying is that your child first needs vision therapy and then needs to get the phonics instruction that he wasn’t physically capable of learning the first time. The question is, will he get it? In first grade, the answer is probably yes, but at a minimum your child should still be responsive to your guidance at home and you can teach him what he needs if the school won’t.

By second grade, it’s harder to get the school system to back up and try something that’s already apparently failed. The trick is to convince someone that something has changed and that your child is finally ready to learn. It can be done, but it’s tougher.

And by third grade–well, let’s just say that many of my clients are third graders because parents are justifiably concerned that their child will not be getting the phonics he needs in school by that time. Interestingly, I find it easy to work with most of my third grade clients whereas their teachers have been struggling with them for three years, and it’s not because I’m a better instructor. I’m just willing to accept the fact that most of my clients are finally able to learn to read and I do have a curriculum that tends to get the job done relatively quickly. Even then, many third graders go through vision therapy, return to school, and begin making good strides toward becoming proficient readers without any additional help. This is particularly true if they had consistent phonics instruction in the first two years of school.

And then there is the case of the children who read well, and like to read, but still struggle because of headaches or other apparent stress caused by the act of reading. These children know phonics well, but have to read and re-read because of their vision issues. They might also be spending long hours doing homework that others get done in half the time or less. Such children can become excellent readers and students once their visual systems are corrected by vision therapy. It is possible to learn phonics and be an excellent reader even though burdened with an undiagnosed vision problem. but it isn’t as much fun.

Note to parents of second graders and up: If you intend to take the phonics instruction matter into your own hands, consider this route: 1) Purchase a copy of Reading Reflex and use it to teach your child the Basic Code and to get a good grasp on the essential reading skills of blending, segmenting and phoneme manipulation. 2) Then read the phonics information on this website and consider purchasing a copy of the OnTrack Reading Advanced Code Workbook I use with each of my clients, regardless of their age.

Next: Help for Fourth Grade and Up, or return to the OnTrack Home Page