There have been so many wonderful things happening regarding Alli's vision therapy, but I just havent been able to keep the updates current. There are a few exciting things I wanted to share.
First, when Alli was first tested, she was classified as having all 3 forms or dyslexia. There was only 1 word she recognized, and she was unable to spell words phonetically. Our school also wanted to test her for dyslexia, but this testing did not occur until 5 weeks into the vision therapy. This second testing put her at just BARELY below average in two categories and average in the third.
When I asked if that meant she was dyslexic, the woman doing the screening said she wouldn't classify her as so. I feel pretty strongly that if this screening had been done prior to starting vision therapy, she would have been much farther below average, I regret not scheduling this screening prior to starting VT so we had a more accurate record of the improvements VT have made in Alli's life, but I know in my heart that VT is changing Alli's life
Second, Alli was retested by her VT doctor and has made amazing improvements in tracking and some of her focusing skills.
In tracking she went from 24% percentile to 75% percentile.
In some of the focusing activities (ability to change focus quickly) she doubled what she was able to do before.
She has stopped suppressing an eye while reading, so two of the activities she couldn't even be testing on initially she was able to do this time around.
Unfortunately, she showed no improvement in being able to sustain focus. I was initially very disappointed about this, but after more thought I realized, we were not doing much of anything where she had to sustain focus. We were doing A LOT of tracking and changing focus, but virtually no sustaining focus, so her results are pretty accurate considering how our efforts have been spent.
Now, starting this week she has 20 minutes of sustained focusing activities, which she does NOT like and makes her head hurt (we do 5 minutes 4 times a day) but she does it without complaint because she can tell she is getting better and is so excited!
We are also going back to her reading book and I am not printing out her stories in large font anymore. Yesterday was the first day of doing this and she read the story below. Some exciting changes in this:
She didn't lose her place
She didnt skip many small words (still skipped 2 or 3 a or the's)
She is simply reading most of the words now instead of sounding everything out
And most exciting of all, we started story writing yesterday and below is her story. She looked up "said" and "going" in the story above but did everything else 100% on her own. Her spelling is improving by leaps and bounds. Prior to this most words had no vowels and lots of missing sounds, but for her to spell BRUSH and UWAY is just amazing.
All of this improvement is after 8 weeks of VT. When Alli starts 3rd grade I have 100% faith she is going to be reading at grade level.
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