By: Darin Browne
Vision therapy has been demonstrated to be an efficient treatment of vision development problems in grade school children. As a Behavioral Optometrist I have practiced with vision therapy and children with learning disabilities for over 20 years, and I see the effectiveness of the suitable tips every day. On the other hand, I am often asked, “Can vision therapy also be efficient for preschool children?”
Vision therapy is an extraordinarily effective tool when it comes to increasing visual skills. It is a great deal more than the conventional eye exercises, which are tedious, repetitive and purely intended to improve eye coordination and focus skills, which are mainly dealing with what we Optometrists are measuring rather than the child's actual learning ability.
But in vision therapy we are presented with the opportunity to invest time and effort into developing visual skills that in reality count when it comes to helping children overcome learning disabilities. It's not merely about the eyes, it is about developing genuine skills which go far further than just eyeballs!
The skills enhanced by vision therapy take in the following:
Eye movements- which help children flow in their reading and stops them misreading words or skipping lines, and it also aids in ball sports.
Focus and Eye Coordination- which helps children to concentrate and apply themselves to their school activities.
Visualization and Recall- which helps children to successfully recall sight words and spelling, giving them a large vocabulary to help them to read.
Laterality and Directionality- which helps children with learning disabilities to triumph over reversals, or writing letters or numbers back to front.
Cross Patterning- which leads children to employ both sides of their brain proficiently.
Other developmental areas- including coding, sequencing, fine and gross motor, etc.
Now, it is easy to see how this can have a vast impact on children who exhibit learning disabilities, but what about the younger kids, the preschoolers who may or may not be exhibiting signs of insufficiency.
Allow me to propose this: if your preschool or kindergarten child is showing signs of being behind the others in the class, then vision therapy is a highly effective tool in developing the visual skills that child may require to catch up and move to the front. It is successful because these skills, which must be developing in children through this period, at times are not developed or underdeveloped. If we can pick up them rapidly and usefully, the child will progress significantly.
Nonetheless, I have also established that, if we do vision therapy and enhance the development of normal kids, we can speed up their performance and by this means increase the learning ability of even “average” children.
In both of these situations, what we require to do is modify our program to suit the preschool or kindergarten level. That's why I have published a home based vision therapy program just for preschoolers, and it works very proficiently in making struggling preschoolers far better, and preschoolers who were performing well, rise to be even better.
This is achieved by training the particular areas that really matter in children and their visual development. For more information and some free material, visit our website for more details.
Article Source: http://www.parentingarticlelibrary.com
To learn How You Can Accelerate Your Preschool Child's Learning And Development, And For FREE Gifts To Help Your Child, Check Out Darin Browne's Online Therapy Site, Preschool Vision Development.
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