Did you know that up to 80% of a child’s learning comes from vision? If your child can read the board from the back of the room, that’s great, but it does not translate to seeing what’s written on the board and processing it properly.

As a child grows up, their brain and eyes work together to develop their binocular vision skills. For example, saccades or “jumping” is an important visual skill for reading. Jumping is being able to quickly move your eyes from one object to the next and when one reads, they usually read one to three words at a time before moving on to the next set of words.

The eyes and brain must work together to process information that is given to us. For example, if a child has difficulty seeing two similar letters (p and q, d and b) they may have visual discrimination issues. If a child is constantly bumping into things or has difficulty colouring within the lines, they may have visual-motor integration issues. This all means that the eyes and the brain are not working together properly to perform these tasks.

When should you be concerned? If you notice your child losing their place when reading, seeing double or having an extremely short attention span, there may be a visual skills or processing problem. In comprehensive eye exams, up to 50% of these vision related problems are missed just because the exams tend to focus on other ocular diseases.

At Eyelab, we perform Functional Vision Assessments and Developmental Vision Analyses that will test these skills that are not usually assessed in regular eye exams. After testing, you are given a comprehensive report of what tests were performed and the results from each test. The report will also include recommendations on how your child can improve his/her visual deficiencies. Vision therapy may be recommended to improve on any of the deficient visual skills.