1 in 4 children struggle with reading because of undiagnosed or undetected vision problems which are rarely related to eyesight. They lack adequate visual skills needed for close up work during reading, writing, and computer tasks. Frequently, children’s symptoms are attributed to problems such as ADHD or learning disabilities when the source of their problems in the classroom is often undiagnosed visual problems. Most frequently these will be convergence insufficiency (an inability of the eyes to work together in locating the object of regard) and reduced accommodation (poorer than expected ability to change focus to keep print clear). When these situations exist we often find that there is difficulty in making smooth eye movements when scanning along the line, and as a result words are missed out.
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Vision is our dominant sense and is estimated to contribute to around 80% of what we learn throughout our life. The whole brain is involved with vision and integrated with all other senses. Two thirds of our brain activity is taken up by processing visual information. Some of the visual skills that can impact learning includes eye tracking, focusing, eye teaming, depth perception, eye-hand-body coordination, visual memory, and visual form perception.
Research has shown that 60% of students identified as learning disabled have undetected visual problems.
Your child can only learn properly if they can move their eyes along the lines of a book smoothly and efficiently, switch from far to near vision quickly and accurately, sustain clarity on targets at different distances such as copying from the board, team the eyes to see single when reading with minimal effort, integrate what they see and what they write, and visually discriminate objects. If your child cannot do these visual tasks efficiently, a bright child can easily be mislabelled learning disabled.