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(As a side note I found it ironic that I had spent so much time researching Auditory Processing Disorder, and had not once looked into Visual Processing Disorder. I think I assumed that because she was such a hands on active child that had to touch and see everything she couldn't possibly have any visual problems)
The vision therapy took up precious after school study time. While we only had to practice the exercises about 20 minutes each day, they drained both Booboo and me. She did not want to do most of the exercises. The ones she had no problems with she liked, but the exercises to teach her left and right caused great anxiety. For both us. For her, I'm sure it was a blow to her self esteem to be doing such basic exercises and not be extremely successful in them. She would become upset and angry and many times storm off.
These exercises were a black cloud hanging over us each day. We were both so aggrevated by the end of the exercise time, neither of us were in a state of mind to continue with reading and spelling practice in addition to any homework she had.
At the end of the therapy she had improved to a 9+ year old level in her visual skills and a 9 year old (right on target by then) in her lat/dir skills, though she was still struggling, and the left/right stuff never did become natural to her.
Her grades at school went up during this time. She was reading better and spelling better too. As before, she still did not have the phonetic awareness, but she could remember the correct order of letters in a word she did know how to spell, and was better at memorizing words she didn't know how to spell.
Four months later and near the end of 3rd grade we were working diligently on spelling, but the old problems were creeping back up. She had a re-evaluation done. Her visual skills were still strong. The doctor had said kids rarely regress in those areas. However, her lat/dir skills had slipped back 1.5 year to a 7.5 year old level. At this time I found out that these skills will regress unless practiced regularly. That meant more of the dreaded lat/dir exercises at home. The black cloud was coming back...
During this same period I was taking a college speech class. For my information/demonstration presentation I chose Visual Processing Disorder as my topic. It was while I was researching the topic I began to run into the word, "dyslexia" at every turn. What was the connection? I searched out sites on dyslexia, took all the "free" diagnostic tests, read as much as I could about it.
Booboo fit all sorts of the classic "symptoms" yet she could read and spell, she just couldn't do it well.
I then made up my mind I would give a shot at teaching her myself over the summer and see how that went. All that I had read on dyslexia suggested that these kids do best with one on one teaching, something a public school could never do.
Mind you, Booboo has not been tested for dyslexia yet. Or any other learning disability outside of the low grade testing the school did in 2nd grade. What is a label anyway I thought? Do we need to spend hundreds (we already have, and where has it got us?) or thousands of dollars just to put a name to her difficulty? *My attitued on this has changed since then as I will explain later.
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Posted by Debbie Coutant