Comments on: Do You See What I See? – A Visual-Spatial Primer

By: joyce

joyce — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 21:59:57 +0000

My daughter is 9years of age. She has been diagnosed with spacial deficit since she was 7years old. She walks on her tip toes but is awsome at sports. She has typical symptoms of ADHD not remembering where she puts her clothes shoes or socks. Her room is always messy and when you tell her to pick up or any thing else she talks back and throws tentrumtantrums.How do I help her to read better with out flash cards as I sure when she gets in to high school flash cards will not help

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 03:29:33 +0000

My daughter was diagnosed with visual spacial deficits several years ago. She is now in 7th grade. She does terribly at math and science. She took vision therapy for over a year and progressed to a level they expected her to reach in 3 months. She struggles with organization and messiness in her room, locker and bookbag. She is very uncoordinated and the school OT said she thinks she just needs more practice at sports. Her self esteem is dashed when she can’t do things the other kids do, like play volleyball or make a basket in gym. She runs with her arms out or flopping about rather than in a pumping fashion as most people run. And sometimes she is on her tiptoes (though she tells me that is just because she is being creative!) She is my free spirit, space cadet, drama queen, and I don’t know how to help her.

By: Robbyn Laufer

Robbyn Laufer — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 20:32:36 +0000

Sandy-
To answer your question- yes there are strategies to improve and as needed to compensate for weak visual perceptual skills. A child can have specific areas of strength and weakness in visual perception as well as eye muscle control and overall learning – the combination of which influences how she might be able to learn to read but not spell or have areas of high skill and other areas of significant weakness. Also, many children compensate very well, at least in earlier grades, if they are bright and their memory is strong.

There are specific tests that can be used to clearly identify your child’s areas of visual perceptual strengths and weaknesses, the results of which can be used to devise a plan for treatment and compensatory strategies. However, visual perceptual challenges rarely occur in isolation and the functional weaknesses are often the results of several areas of deficit. Additional areas of weakness that commonly occur with visual perceptual deficits include: oculomotor control (eye muscle control) weaknesses, visual sensitivity, postural control weaknesses, and sensory integration challenges.

Occupational Therapists are often the professionals that can test for these issues and they can look at the big picture as it relates to day to day function. In fact, I would recommend such an evaluation, especially since your child was adopted from Asia and likely had a fairly deprived early childhood/infancy period, which contributes to a combination of sensory processing related issues.
However, depending on your child’s age, your main concerns, and where you live, you might have a vision therapist do a fully eye focused eval- that would assess eye muscle control and visual perceptual skills, as well as visual acuity and basic eye function. In addition, there might be specific learning disabilities that are contributing to your child’s weakness- which would be best evaluated through psycho educational evaluation, which would also likely assess visual perceptual skills.

Remediation of visual perceptual skills is typically carried out by an occupational therapist or a vision therapist.

I hope this is helpful.

Robbyn Laufer, OTR/L
Director
Kids Can Occupational Therapy Services
And Author of this article.

By: Linda Kitchell

Linda Kitchell — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:53:18 +0000

I am a grandmother of an 8 year old girl who sounds exactly like your daughter. I also taught middle school language arts for many years before retiring.
What stategies have you found to help your daughter “cope and copensate” for her problem areas?

By: Sandy Fusco

Sandy Fusco — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 11:50:13 +0000

I think that my child may be diagnosed
with visual/spatial processing deficits.
She is very smart; however, her grades
have been inconsistent, and I have been
concerned. How has she been able to
read as well as I think she has???
Her spelling is atrocious. That has
been one major sign that there is a
problem. Please tell me how I will
be able to help her.
She is my Asian adopted child, and
I am almost surprised that this could
be happening to her. I am assumisng that she will be helped so that she
will not struggle as she has in the past. Her memory must be excellent as
she has some excellent grades as well.
Please advise.

Thanks !
Sandy Fusco Mom and Language Arts
Teacher ( middleschool )