Vision is understanding as well as seeing.
What is vision therapy?
It is one thing to identify underperforming areas of physical eye control, or difficulties with cognitive aspects of vision, but another thing to remediate and strengthen these difficulties. Vision Therapy is an opportunity to use specially designed games, exercises and activities to improve vision and visual perception. Vision Therapy helps you understand your visual world, in a range of situations from improved movement in sports to comprehension in reading.
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How does vision therapy work?
Vision therapy is usually conducted over a period of 8 weeks or so-over a school term. However your child's vision therapy may be shorter or longer than this depending on their difficulties. Because the activities that we ask your child to do, require demonstration and explanation, vision therapy is usually conducted with fortnightly in office vision therapy visits, followed by essential home practice of the prescribed activities for at least 15 minuted every night.
The home practice of the prescribed activities is absolutely essential. If home practice cannot take place regularly and reliably, little improvement will occur.
Often students we see have missed out on 3 or 4 years practice of an essential visual skill. From an early age, young children will tend to avoid doing what they find hard.
Vision therapy starts where your child is at and follows a developmental approach. It makes sense that at least 8 weeks of regular practice and activity will be needed to try to catch up a deficit created over several years.
What sort of things are used in vision therapy?
Many but not all our vision therapy programs are computer-assisted. This means your child may well need access to a computer. Most of our programmes are compatible with the PC (and a Mac if you have the Windows platform). HOWEVER this does not mean that your child will sit alone using a computer program. The activities need adult supervision and participation. The activities are also often movement based and use tactile materials such as blocks and pencil and paper activities.
Do all skills respond equally to vision therapy?
No. Because our visual skills, like any other body and brain skill, are a combination of development, learning, practice but also more hard wired brain skills governed by genetics, different skills have different outlooks for improvement. Your consulting optometrist will be able to guide you to have realistic expectations about the outcome of vision therapy for your child.
Of course when visual difficulties are encountered that have a poorer prognosis for improvement with vision therapy, there are still a number of alternative learning and teaching strategies that we can suggest and help implement, to optimize your child's visual learning.
At the end of vision therapy
Vision therapy helps to grow and develop essential visual skills. These skills then continue to grow into adulthood. New research has revealed that even the adult brain is more plastic than previously imagined!
Because your child's brain is still continuing to develop it is important to continue to optimise the development of the skills that you both worked so hard on.
After vision therapy some students will lift away and complete optimal visual brain development smoothly. Other students, particularly those with a greater constellation of difficulties, may again plateau with skill development and benefit from further vision therapy activities down the track.
To maintain optimal brain development and learning progress
1. Make sure you and your child attend for the review visit after vision therapy. This allows us to quantify changes and plan for their path over the following year or so.
2. Keep these skills under review. We will remind you every 2 years or so that your child continues to progress optimally.
To find out more about our high quality eye care services or to make an appointment to see one of our qualified optometrists, get in touch today.
