Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Vision therapy

Hi !

I was wondering if anyone had experience with vision therapy.

Our son (9yo)had wiat and wisc iv done 2 years ago and we didn't get an official IQ too much discrepancy in the results.( if you search my name you will find his results)he is also trilingual.

Someone at the time mentioned it might be some visual issues. So long story short we got him tested only recently he started doing funny thing with his eyes ,rubbing them constantly,he stopped reading and writing,taking 3 hours to do one math word problem( at his level) etc.
The test showed some issues for convergence the average is 12 and he got a 5 and for eye tracking he tested 2 years behind.
By how much do you think it would affect the IQ testing?
If your children had vision therapy done did you notice a big change with vision issue?

It is funny because when we received his testing results the psychologist told us he was definitely not a visual- Spatial or visual learner but definitely auditory-sequential but at home being with him I thought he was very visual.Little he would notice every details while driving around, building things, now playing minecraft the things that he is doing are amazing, he is extremely gifted in sports hockey and soccer he understands the game and see the plays like a teenager ( he is way beyond his teammate)he would do math in his head

Any input would be great.

Thank you

Having those sort of issues myself paired with fairly extreme visualization skills: My working hypothesis is that when automatic visual systems don't function right, the less-automatic brain may assert control giving much more access to those skills for conscious thought. Like I can't catch, but I can build anything in my head.

In testing, you might see lower scores in picture matching or find the difference type tasks, but very high scores in three dimensional rotation or counting hidden cubes in a structure tasks.

We did visual therapy with a speech pathologist. She used the glasses as my DS read stuff, and each week we went up on the glasses. Anyway, it did help him with the reading. We don't exactly understand why it helped him.
It could have been the one hour reading homework (with the glasses) just gave him enough practice. Or it could be that glasses every week helped strength his eye muscles.

My son has been doing vision therapy for awhile now... It's been great for him - he hated reading and his eyes would always water and become sore, etc. Now he loves reading and his eyes are much less strained. It's really been good for him. Many of us have posted about vision therapy and our experiences with it so if you search you'd probably pull up many helpful threads.

kaboom, I have a dd who has had vision challenges due to weak eye muscles. She went through vision therapy and it made a huge difference for her. FWIW, some of what you wrote in this post matches my dd, other things in your original posts don't.


The symptoms you listed are things we saw happen with my dd, but her achievement testing was not as high as your ds and she struggled with visual tasks from an earlier age and consistently, whereas your ds has high achievement scores and suddenly started resisting school work.

My dd also had a very clear pattern on her WISC that related to vision - she scored consistently on most subtests but had large dips in scores on two subtests that are vision dependent: symbol search and block design. Your ds had high scores on symbol search -this subtest requires the student to find identical symbols on a random crowded field of symbols, and I think it's timed. Your ds had a lot of scatter in other subtests but it is so widespread that it would be difficult (I think) to relate it specifically to vision. Since he had across the board high achievement scores at the same age, I would tend to question whether or not he was fully engaged during the WISC testing.

I'd also recommend searching on previous vision therapy posts as Irena has suggested.

Best Wishes,

polarbear

The vision therapy our dd had didn't involve using lenses but instead involved a lot of different types of exercises which we repeated daily at home. We were given an explanation with each exercise re how it worked and what specifically was targeted, as well as having performance goals that had to be met before moving on.

Our dd had tracking issues, double vision, and limited peripheral vision. We were able to actually see her tracking difficulties once we we to look for them, and we were able to ask her about double vision and she could tell us when she was seeing double as well as show is how limited her peripheral vision was. As she made improvements with via therapy symptoms disappeared such as clumsiness, not following directions easily etc and her reading ability sky-rocketed.

polarbear

I was about to post here, but think I'll start my own thread so as not to hijack.

My ds 7, has been in vision therapy for convergence insuffiency. It involves exercises in the office and at home. We have seen great progress since vt. He has more endurance and his level of reading has greatly increased. Also, his handwriting has improved.

I just searched Vision Therapy and am so happy to see this thread! DS6 was just diagnosed with tracking problems (among a few other things) and is going to start vision therapy. I'm thrilled to see so many positive comments on results. I know it will be a lot of work but I'm hoping that the kid we know at home will actually show up on tests...we've seen a lot of the same results that others of you described, such as doing very well on certain subsets but then tanking on the visually heavy ones. And the test that our district relies on most is the NNAT2, which is visual-spatial.

So hoping that vision therapy helps him. All of your comments are very encouraging!

VT can be very helpful. Basically there is more to vision than acuity. Tracking (cicadas) are very important in reading and eye teaming can be very important in many other visual/spatial tasks. I am married to a developmental optometrist and ironically enough our DD has an eye turn. So, she has had some form of VT since she was 2. Binip do you live in the US? If so, your SLP is not legally allowed to do VT (I am glad whatever she did helped but has no real training in that area). Some visual problems just increase the effort required for academics and make school tasks harder. On the WISC IV my DD eye turn issues gave her the most difficulty on coding followed by SS (processing speed cluster).