I took the kids to the eye doctor last week. They had exams 2 years ago, and everything seemed fine, but they were due for exams (especially since they don't get vision screening in school). Right at the beginning of the exam, my daughter was having trouble seeing some of the letters, and I could tell they expected her to be able to see them. Turns out that she has smaller than normal pupils which makes her far-sighted. Since she has had a hard time with learning to read, the doctor recommended reading glasses. So maybe her inablity to clearly see the letters on the page is why "car" looks like "can," and she gets easily frustrated with reading.

My son, on the other hand, did learn to read really well by the time he was about 7 1/2. It just "clicked" for him, and he was able to read long words that he never could have decoded with the phonics he had learned. But I've been surprised he has never moved on to chapter books. I forced him through one Magic Treehouse book, and he really enjoyed reading it (and made a lot of progress in his ability to read full pages). There are other similar books that he has checked out from the library, but he always chooses to read picture books with only one or two sentences on a page. So we learned in the course of his eye exam that he has a very hard time with "converging" his eyes. The doctor has recommended he see a pediatric developmental optometrist for an evaluation and to get some exercises to help. Perhaps he'll be able to enjoy reading even more once his eye muscles learn to work better!

I'm hoping that getting both kids help with their eyes will make reading less of a chore for them and that they'll learn to love reading as much as their dad and I do!