Putting 2012 to Bed

As we are closing up 2012, I feel like there is a lot of great things that have happened this year. From our children reading better, to catching touchdowns, to expanding peripheral awareness, to new office gadgets, to a new website, to this new blog! Here at Optometric Physicians, we have a lot to be thankful for.

Thank you to all for being apart of our journey. You have allowed us to be apart of your families, and I thank you for all your hard work and dedication.




Today I wanted to touch on the most popular blogs this year:

1. Our series on Perceptual Skills:

I.Visual Discrimination

II. Visual Memory

III.Spatial Relations

IV. Form Constancy

V. Sequential Memory

VI. Figure Ground

2. How to Make Vision Therapy Home Exercises Fun! & Fun Home Exercises! Continued....: We all know Home Vision Therapy needs to be fun to help motivate our patients. Those blogs are great resources.   

3. Let Your Children Explore and Play! : I am a big advocate of hands-on-activities, as opposed to electronics like an iPhone/iPad or a Nintendo DS.

4. What are Primative Reflexes? : This is a great subject, and is a very challenging subject to understand, which is why I think it makes the "most popular blog list" this year. For the whole series: What Causes Reflexes to Be Retained?, Retained Reflexes related to Learning Difficulties.

5. Is there correlation between ADD/ADHD and vision problems?: Most of my patients are diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, and since there is a correlation between the two, it intrigues our readers.

6. And finally - Vision Therapy Resources: Who doesn't want to know more about Vision Therapy?! These are great resources that some of my parents loved.

There it is... I have enjoyed blogging and learning more about what I am passionate about - VISION THERAPY! What were your favorite blogs this year?! What would you like me to blog about?

Have a great holiday season! And looking forward to seeing you all in the New Year! 

Our New Gadgets and Gizmos

For a long time now I have been wanting to do a blog on the new cool things that have been brought to our office. As our practice grows we have the opportunity to find more ways to accommodate and help our patients. One way we stay up to date is through technology. Today I am going to talk about two technological ways we are making what we do better!

First up: Sanet Vision Integrator (SVI). This 46” touch screen monitor is designed to improve visual abilities for a wide range of patients with visually-related learning problems, strabismus, amblyopia, and traumatic brain injury (TBI). It is also very effective for sports vision enhancement work with athletes.

The key features that make this “all in one” instrument so useful are the variety of programs and many ways that visual abilities can be enhanced. The SVI instrument actually “speaks”, instructing the patient to respond to verbal commands, improving auditory-visual integration and memory. The SVI can be used to enhance the following visual abilities: Pursuits, saccades, fixation stability, eye-hand coordination, visual reaction time, speed and span of recognition, automaticity, and contrast sensitivity, plus visual and auditory sequencing and memory. In addition it is extremely effective when working with visual acuity improvement in patients with amblyopia, TBI patients with visual field loss, visual-spatial neglect, and visual-vestibular integration problems, and with patients with rhythm, reading, and math problems.

As you can see, it is a great asset to our Vision Therapy Program. Click here for video demonstrations.

Next: Diopsys^® NOVA-VEP. This test called Visual Evoked Potential (VEP) objectively measures the functional responses of the entire visual pathway from the anterior segment of the eye to the visual cortex. By using VEP, the device provides quantitative information to support the interpretation and management of eye and vision deficits, and reports and documents the results of practitioner intervention for tracking patients’ response. It is easy to use, non-invasive, and provides a quick qualitative analysis of the VEP waveform and easy quantitative analysis of the amplitude (strength) and latency (speed) values. We test children six months of age and older, patients with a degenerative process such as glaucoma or multiple sclerosis (MS), or patients following a neurological event like traumatic brain injury (TBI) or stroke in order to help the clinician detect visual deficits such as optic nerve disorders, amblyopia, and other neuro-visual disorders.

In easier terms it is measuring the communication between your eyes and the brain. Isn't that our goal with Vision Therapy?! Now we have a test that shows us the wavelengths of the brain activity through both eyes. This test can also show the effectiveness Vision Therapy has of each patient. WOW!

As you can see these are two tests to be very excited about. Thankful we have the opportunity to provide our patients with the best up-to-date technology.

Lastly, another new thing is Optometric Physicians of Middle Tennessee has a twitter! If you would like to follow click here.

Thanks for all the followers and readers, we appreciate you! 

COVD Conference

Happy December! I have had a lot of great feedback from last blog post, titled Travel Therapy. I was going to do an individual blog on Stocking Stuffers, but the list I gave you on Travel Therapy, are all great gifts! Also, a fellow Vision Therapy Center in Brookfield, Mich., did a blog post titled 81 Vision Friendly Gifts for Kids. It has a great list a gifts for Christmas that help improve hand-eye coordination, visualization, and space perception.

Speaking of fellow vision therapists, I recently went to Fort Worth, Texas, for College of Optometrists in Vision Developement (COVD) conference. COVD does conferences once a year, and the course I took this year was called VT101. We discussed everything from the use of prisms and to sensory/motor fusion. After each class all the vision therapists would talk about all the different exercises we do. I met Vision Therapists from Denver, Colorado to Canada. I came back to the office with more knowledge and FUN activities that all my patients have enjoyed.

All in all, it was great to get all the vision therapists from around the world together. It is great to be surrounded around people who are just as passionate about Vision Therapy as you are.

Until next week we will chat about some of the new stuff in our Vision Therapy area. Have a great weekend! 

Travel Therapy!

It is the holiday season, which means... lots of road trips coming our way. When I was growing up, my family traveled at least five hours to see our relatives. I remember coloring, listening to my cassette player (oh yeah!), playing Yahtzee with my brother, and playing "I Spy". Nowadays, most of our kids are playing with electronics or watching TV.

Today's blog is called Travel Therapy for a reason! I am going to give you some great Vision Therapy exercises to do on the road (or airplane)! Your children with have no idea they are doing therapy!

 Travel Bag Goodies:

1. Hidden Pictures: This improves your child’s Figure Ground skills.
1. Search Google - Printable Hidden Pictures.
2. Or go to Amazon!
2. If you remember from this blog: Put a small sticker on the window nearest your child, and instruct him/her to look at the sticker for a few seconds, then to look outside at the farthest thing their eyes can find, and then back at the sticker again. Have your child do this at least 10 times every time they get in the car.  
3. Word Searches: Improves Visual Closure and Figure Ground skills. 

1.      Search Google - Printable Word Searches 

2.      Or go to Amazon!     

4. Color by number- Works on Visual Motor skills, Saccades, improves their                  number recognition skills as they identify and match each number with its corresponding color using a number. 
1. Search Google - Printable Color by Number
2.  Or go to Amazon!
5. Dot-to-Dot: Improves Visual Closure Skills and Visual Motor skills.

1.      Search Google - Printable Dot-to-Dot

2.      Or go to Amazon!

6.      Play "I Spy" with your children - Improves Figure Ground skills. 

7.      Mazes: Improves Pursuits, Figure Ground, Spatial Relations skills.

1.      Search Google- Printable Mazes

2.      Or go to Amazon! 

As you can see, there are many fun ways to do Vision Therapy on the road. These are all easy things to do with your children, and it doesn't cost a lot of money. Make the games fun and I promise these games are the way to go! You can do therapy wherever your holiday plans take you. 

VII: Visual Closure

We have come to the end of our seven-part Perceptual Skill blog series. This post focuses (a little Vision Therapy humor) on Visual Closure, which is the ability to visualize a complete whole when given incomplete information or a partial picture. 

Why is this important? It is the foundation skill for fluency and speed in reading and writing. This skill helps children read and comprehend quickly; their eyes don't have to individually process every letter in every word for them to quickly recognize the word by sight. This skill can also help children recognize inferences and predict outcomes that they experience through their daily lives. 

Children with poor visual closure may have difficulty completing a thought. They may also confuse similar objects or words, especially words with close beginning or endings.

These activities aim to help a child organize and integrate what they see to create a recognizable visual image:

  1. Jigsaws

  2. Dot to dot

  3. Coloring in

  4. Word searches

  5. Writing or drawing in sand or foam

  6. Incomplete sentences. Fill in the missing letters or words

  7. Matching complete and incomplete shapes

  8. Construction games

  9. Scrabble

10. Stencils

11. Model making

12. Building 3D models. E.g. K'nex

13. Partially covering a picture and asking the child to identify the whole.

There you have it! This was a great series to learn more about how we perceive things. I hope this was a great learning experience for you. I have a some great blog entries coming up for this upcoming holiday season. Looking forward to all that is to come!

Here is the complete series of Perceptual Skills:

I.Visual Discrimination

II. Visual Memory

III.Spatial Relations

IV. Form Constancy

V. Sequential Memory

VI. Figure Ground

Part VI: Figure Ground

Happy November! We are almost coming to the end of our series about the perceptual skills.

Today we are going to discuss Figure-Ground. This skill helps us learn to visually isolate one object from a group of objects. For example, has your child asked, "Mom, I can't find my shoes?!" Of course, those shoes are right under your child's nose. Besides inattention, it could be the result of your child having difficulty distinguishing the “figure” (shoes) from the background (the other shoes in the closet), the “background.” Note where this skill gets its name. Makes sense, right?

Let's break this down. First, perception is what goes on in our internal mental world: how we organize and give meaning to raw data which we receive from the outside world through our senses.

There are two types of Figure Ground perceptions (just like Sequential Memory):

· Auditory figure-ground perception: is the ability to hear the voice of one speaker over the   background noises (music, other conversations, road noises).

· Visual figure-ground perception: is an inborn tendency which allows us to distinguish objects from a background.

Can you image how it might affect your child if he has a figure-ground weakness? Some examples of a child having figure-ground weakness may find difficulties in:

· Keeping their place when reading and scanning from one word to the next.

· Finding a word in a dictionary.

· Copying from a book or board, because they are prone to losing their place or omitting sections of work.

· Understanding pictures because they struggle to differentiate the outlines from the background.  

· Paying attention because it is hard to focus on one object while ignoring or blocking out the background. 

Practical ideas to improve figure-ground perception:

· When reading, use a book marker below the sentence that is being read.

· Play “I spy” games.

· Carry out specific instructions that involve looking for and fetching specific things (find the red pencil in the box; look for a picture of a flower on this page; design a treasure hunt).

· Sort objects according to shape, size, color, thickness, etc.

· Identify objects in pictures with a lot of detail

· Use tracing paper to trace patterns or complete mazes, do dot-to-dot or spot-the-difference pictures.

· Write a sentence without spacing between the words. Help the child to find the words by placing the spaces correctly.

· Word searches

· Find words in a dictionary.

Next week, is our last perceptual skill: Visual Closure. Have a great weekend! If you are just joining us here is the link to the beginning of our take on Perceptual Skills, Part I.

Part V: Sequential Memory

Hope all is well in the Vision Therapy world!

Last week I was in Fort Worth, Texas, for a COVD seminar. It was a great experience to interact with other therapists. I will expand more on my experience in the next couple of posts.

Today's blog is going to be about Sequential Memory. There are two types of Sequential Memory we work on here: Auditory and Visual Sequencing. Auditory Sequential and Visual Sequential Memory skills are the ability to remember things heard and seen in sequence.  

Students that have trouble with both Sequential Memories experience difficulty copying from the board, learning to read, remembering what they have read, and being able to complete a task in the order they were given.

If there is difficulties with both, can you imagine how hard school can be? As you can imagine saying 91 + 1 or 19 + 1 or spelling “t-a-r” instead of “r-a-t” or reading “dog” instead of “god” could completely change the meaning of a situation.

Sequential Memory is very important perceptual skill in our everyday life. If you would like some steps to help improve both skills, email me at: vt@rdeye.com.