Hi everyone,
I am new here, but I have read lots of posts and would love some advice from those of you who are further down this road.
My son is a 3rd grader who has struggled since kindergarten. To make a long story short, this fall he was diagnosed with convergence insufficiency and has been undergoing vision therapy for 6 months. (Doc says to expect 9 months total.) At school, he was diagnosed as having a “specific learning disability for reading, math & writing.”
He has an IEP in place and works with a tutor daily. We also go to a reading specialist weekly outside of school. (Incidentally, the teachers and special ed coordinators at school don’t seem to put much stock in vision therapy in general. Interesting since we initiated vision processing testing at their suggestion. We decided to continue therapy anyway.) With this he is about 1 to 1.5 years behind in reading, but is making good progress.
My question is, what could we be doing with him over the summer to spur further progress? We will of course read with him daily, practice math, and continue with the reading tutor. But is there something else you would recommend? We want to take advantage of the time.
Thank you!
Re: Vision therapy & SLD, what should be our next steps?
Are you talking about additional therapies to help further his progress or academics to help further his progress?
Academically I think you have it taken care of. Don’t forget to find some fun time too!
If you are asking about other therapies, we would have to know if there were processing problems other than visual processing problems. My child had both visual and auditory. VT helped alot. The school psychologist recommended it, but the teachers were very critical of it. So we didn’t persue it since we spent so much money on tutoring. I wished I had my son do VT in 4th grade instead of 8th!
Best wishes…
Always Wondering
Re: Vision therapy & SLD, what should be our next steps?
Thanks scifinut for the words of encouragement! It has been difficult to get the right information and know what to do with it. It’s nice to know we’re on the right track :)
Susan
Re: Vision therapy & SLD, what should be our next steps?
Hi Always Wondering :)
I know what you mean about finding time for fun too! I am sure my son works as hard or harder than any other student in his class. Unfortunately his grades don’t often reflect all that work. But we do make sure he gets to do the fun stuff too :)
The only processing problem that has been diagnosed is the vision. The psychologist who did his testing suspected auditory was the problem, but the school speech & auditory therapist did some observation and had his results checked by an expert at Ohio State. She said that she didn’t think it was a problem. We never had the formal test at OSU since the waiting list there was so long and by that time the vision problem had been diagnosed.
I’m so glad your son had good results from VT. Better later than never. I wonder why some teachers are so critical of it. Maybe people expect a “magic bullet” and when it doesn’t come they discount it completely. For our son time will tell. But the confidence he has gained by having somewhere that he can succeed has been worth it to me.
Susan
You are doing exactly the right thing. I’ve always practiced a summer “homeschool” program for both my kids. Just a couple hours in the morning so they stay in practice with good study habits over the summer. Did you know that “typical” kids lose 11% of what they learned over the summer break?? My LD dd at least didn’t lose anything over the summers, even though her progress was slow in grade school. I’ve noticed that it accelerated about the time she hit middle school.