If you know that your child can READ WORDS WELL BUT they LOSE THEIR PLACE when reading and are not as FLUENT as they should be, then read this.. .

[noonar]

my dd is nearly 9 and despite having a reading age (when tested) much older than her actual age, she is not a very fluent reader. she hates reading allowed and tends to omit and substitute words on the page.

well yesterday she had a vision test. i dont just mean seeing if she can read letters from a certain distance- which she can. i mean a proper in depth vision test.

... it turns out that she has a tracking probelm, making it really hard to follow a line of text on the page.

it is very common for children to have undetected vision problems, even though their eye sight is generally good.

so glad that this has been identified relatively early as the impact of not seeing yourself as a good reader is pretty huge .

she is not getting reading glasses. suddenly, with the correct lens, her reading speed / accuracy doubled.

hope this is useful / interesting for somebody

If you are near Oxford or Reading you can take them to the Dyslexia research trust. My son saw them and his problems/issues related to the fact he didn't have a dominate eye, and used to swap whilst reading.

What did they suggest to resolve it?

We got some blue glasses, but although they helped a bit he wouldn't wear them. Eventually he grew out of the lack of a dominant eye. But then the Dyslexia research Trust is a charity developed from research by Oxford University and an Ophthalmologist in Reading.

DD2 had glasses for Long sight and astygmatism (sp?)at age 2.5.

She struggled with reading when she first started school and I was puzzled as she was very bright.

She caught up and age 7 had a reading age of 10 but still had difficulties reading out loud/ missed words lost her place.

At one of her routine appointments aged about 8 we saw a different optician who tested her tracking and said her eye muscles were jerky and tracking was very weak. This had never been suggested before even though she had been regularly seen by a so called specialise paediatric opthalmologist from a baby.

We found a coloured overlay with a guide line really helped.

She is now 12 and only wears glasses for reading. The tracking problem seems to have resolved itself.

i spoke to the behavioural optometrist near us,as mentioned in indigo's link and they were surprised that the optometrist had even looked at/ noticed her tracking problems. i find it incredible that such a problem, which can be rectified so easily with glasses, would not be picked upat a sight test! it's madness.

we have decided to let dd settle down with her new glasses and maybe investigate the vision therapt further in the easter hols.

also meant to add that i am surprised that so many of you , with similar problems, have found this thread relevant . must be a common problem... v interested in your experiences.

Funnily enough my niece (8) has just got glasses for this problem-all of a sudden now she's loving reading as she found it very hard work before :)