Vision Therapy Progress

I still need to blog about why Lamb 2 is attending Vision therapy twice a week now. I can already see a few glimpses into his progress. I wanted to blog this before I forget where he started. I will try to occasionally blog highlights of his every day life now.

1. Today we worked on a Top Secret Adventure of Spain. (Another blog post I need to do is about Top Secret Adventures that we have recently done.) One page has pictures of 6 people and you need to find five of those people (like Where's Waldo). The one that you can not find is no longer a suspect in the puzzle. Lamb 2 was easily able to find these and when I said one was a suspect, he would rule that out for me because the shoes were the wrong color or something like that. He worked on a similar puzzle (Hidden Pictures) at OT a few months ago. Even when the therapist pointed out where to look, Lamb 2 could not see the Hidden Pictures at all. So this was a good sign that Lamb 2 could find the suspects in the puzzle today even faster than his brothers could!

2. Lamb 2 has been tired and ready for bed at 7pm instead of his bedtime at 8pm. The 7-8pm hour is full of tears and grouchy and just want to go to bed even if we're just reading aloud or doing something calm before bedtime. I spoke to his teacher at VT today about this. She suspects that his brain is processing everything he is doing in VT and now he is doing this every minute he is awake, so that would wear him out. He may also be growing or so much sickness is going around that perhaps he had a touch of a bug. But what the VT teacher said makes sense to me. She said this will continually improve as he does VT.

3. Lamb 2 finished his Saxon Math 2 book. I decided to do some review but not begin the Math 3 book now. I spoke to his VT teacher about this too. With homeschooling we have the luxury to truly go at Lamb 2's pace. Since he is ahead in math we can use this time to focus on therapy and exercises for therapy and continue to work on reading and phonics at a very slow pace. I told his teacher that right now I am expecting quality work from him as compared to before I might have let him finish a paper a little sloppy. But that quality work is much less work than I expected before he started VT. So we work on phonics for 5 minutes 2 or 3 times a day instead of 20 or 30 minutes a day like we did before. I can already see progress in reading rhyming words and phonics awareness in those 5 minutes of hard work that I have not seen before.

This is all amazing to me. I expected to see progress after 2 or 3 months, not after 2 1/2 weeks. His VT teacher said he is a completely different student than the first time she saw him. She said he has always been a perfectly behaved student for her, that the way he follows her directions etc. are so much better than the first time she saw him. I have the unique perspective that I am both his mom and his teacher. It is not just the VT teacher saying this nor just his teacher saying this. I can see it myself both in daily activities at home and his school work. I look forward to seeing his progress after several months of VT!