How Visual Processing Skills Affect Reading
Can you imagine trying to read with your eyes closed? That sounds ridiculous, right? Yet kids with dyslexia struggle to process visual stimuli to the point you might wonder if their eyes aren’t indeed closed.
Reading is primarily a visual process. Even though the auditory component is important when your child reads, visual processing skills take the front seat. Visual processing skills are those we take in through sight.
But there’s more to all this whole equation than what you’d think…
Interpreting Information…
When your child looks out into the world, the brain interprets the visual information seen in a manner that allows your child to give meaning to it. The brain will then give your child feedback regarding what was seen – such as the size, distance, and shape of these objects. From there, your child can discriminate between subtle differences among those objects seen in space.
Visual Reading Struggles
We take in light with our eyes but do the actual processing of visual stimuli in our brains. That’s one reason why kids with dyslexia struggle to read. By definition, their condition is one of neurodevelopmental origin. This simply means they are “wired” differently than others. It has nothing to do with their intelligence, as kids with dyslexia are indeed bright kids!
One of the main areas that kids with dyslexia struggle with, though, are visual processing skills. At one point, professionals thought that dyslexia was primarily a visual problem. But new research lets us know there’s an auditory component as well.
Vision…Our Primary Learning Sense
Did you know we take in from 75 to 90% of our information visually? This makes vision our primary learning sense. Because this learning sense is so strong, there are a lot of things that can go wrong! Kids who struggle to process visual stimuli will usually struggle in school, especially with reading.
Visual Processing Problems
When something goes wrong while processing visual stimuli, it’s called a visual processing disorder. This simply means having a difficult time processing visual information. Kids with dyslexia really struggle with visual processing skills. This, of course, affects reading, as reading is primarily a visual skill.
Think about a classroom and all the visual information a child has to think about while there. How about doing homework or answering questions on a math page.
All are heavily reliant on visual processing skills.
When it’s a Chore to Read…
If a child has dyslexia, where visual processing skills are disrupted, then reading is a chore. The information gets skewed in the child’s brain, and the output isn’t what it’s supposed to be. Kids with dyslexia will often avoid reading at all costs because of this! Sometimes, reading can even be painful to a child with visual processing problems.
Vision Issues and the Dyslexic Reader
If your child has dyslexia or a visual processing disorder, then reading is probably quite difficult. Oral reading is most likely choppy and irregular. Your child might stammer and stutter. Fluency scores are low, and because of this, comprehension is usually affected in a negative way.
Think about it. If visual information is coming in incorrectly, it’s hard to make sense of letters or words. In addition, these same letters or words might be reversed or appear backward, upside down, or slanted. These kids will skip lines while reading, sometimes even skipping whole paragraphs.
In addition, copying information from one surface to another can be a brutal process for the dyslexic learner. And, this doesn’t just affect writing. Lining up math problems is a chore as well. These kids will also be messy, disorganized, and seem “lost” a lot of the time.
Kids with dyslexia and visual processing disorders have a hard time telling the subtle differences between letters, words, pictures, and numbers. This confuses them, and often, answers are wrong, the process of sorting it all out too difficult. Comparing and contrasting in written work can be unbearable for them.
In order to correctly process visual stimuli, a child must have proper binocular vision. This is where two eyes work together to make one image. Kids who struggle in this area might not be able to coordinate both eyes with each other.
It’s Visual…Not Intelligence
Obviously this isn’t an intelligence issue, yet every day kids with dyslexia and visual processing problems are made to feel dumb when in fact, they are quite bright. They are just processing visual information differently than others. The images they take in might be blurred, Letters and numbers might have halos around them. Print might be distorted, reversed, or slanted.
Since these kids were born this way, they can’t imagine thinking or learning another way. They can’t come to us and let us know something isn’t quite right, because it’s the only way they know!
Another thing that can affect visual processing is weak eye muscle movement. Our eye muscles must be strong and move fluidly across a page in order to read efficiently. Each eye has six muscles holding it in place. Like any muscle in the body, weaknesses can occur. Or, the muscles might not allow the eyes to line up correctly, and this affects how the student processes visual information.
Processing Visual Information
There are numerous visual processing skills that your child needs to use in order to process visual information and stimuli correctly, especially for reading. If your child struggles in one visual area, it will affect another, as these skills all need to work together as a team for optimul results to occur.
If one or two visual processing skills are weak, the others can sometimes pick up the slack, but most of the time, an avalanche of reading failure occurs when visual processing skills are weak. That’s why your dyslexic child’s reading program needs to have a lot of visual cues, picture, and colors. It also should be brain based to help your child naturally learn instead of forcing information down your child’s throat.
Kids with Dyslexia are Weak in Visual Processing Skills
Kids with dyslexia are almost always weak in visual processing skills, although they can also have “gifts” in this area as well, as they see things in ways we don’t or can’t. Often, adult dyslexics become architects and mechanical engineers, learning how to channel their visual “gifts” in a positive way.
But this doesn’t always happen. All too often kids with dyslexia and poor visual processing skills have poor self-esteem, develop social skills problems, and resort to using odd behaviors as coping mechanisms for what they are up against.
Coping Mechanisms Often Get Them in Trouble
They will often act out in school, become the class clown, or retreat as a way of coping with a long, tortuous school day. These kids need a reading program that meets their needs to keep their futures bright. One they can understand and immediately succeed in.
Think about it. 48% of our prison population is dyslexic. These are the “kids” who didn’t power through, who didn’t find a way to make their “gifts” shine.
Visual Processing Skills that Affect Reading
Visual Tracking:
Visual tracking is the ability to move the eyes fluidly across a page. The eyes must sweep smoothly across lines of print in order for reading fluency to occur. Kids with weak eye muscles or misaligned eyes have a difficult time with visual tracking.
This, in turn, makes it hard to decode letters and turn them into words. Your child will stutter and stammer when reading out loud and take longer than peers to complete assignments if visual tracking is weak. This is because fluency scores are low due to the slowed rate.
Reading Stops and Starts
There are also important stops and starts that the eye makes while tracking smoothly across a page of print. Problems can occur when the stops take too long or when the stop doesn’t happen at all.
Any disruption to the flow of your child’s eyes moving across the page causes a pause, a glitch of sorts. This stops the flow of reading, which lowers reading fluency scores. Even with the small starts and stops that happen, there must be a natural flow to promote proper expression and the ability to decode rapidly enough for automaticity to occur.
Reading Automaticity
Automaticity is the ability to do something without consciously thinking about it, and the skill is vitally important for reading fluency to occur. I your child has to think too much and too hard about what the next letter will be, then fluency will be slow. The same is true for the starts and stops with the fluidity of eye movement across a page.
This back and forth sweeping across the page along with those tiny stops and starts must overall be a smooth, flowing process if reading is to happen naturally.
Eye/hand coordination:
Eye/hand coordination is the ability to coordinate the visual system with information received visually through the eyes while communicating with the hands. When the eyes direct attention to the hands, then the task can be executed.
Many times, a learning block occurs or the information is skewed in communication between the eye and the hand, making eye/hand coordination weak. If your child has weak eye/hand coordination, it will usually first show up in messy drawing and writing that is below expected grade level performance.
Later, it carries over primarily to written work, although reading skills can be affected by it as well. Students with poor eye/hand coordination struggle with writing and performing fine motor skills activities.
It Does Affect Reading!
Although reading isn’t directly affected by poor eye/hand coordination, it does factor in. If eye/hand coordination is weak, usually another “sister” visual processing skill will be weak as well. For instance, visual motor integration is important for reading and is closely tied to eye/hand coordination.
Although visual motor integration and eye/hand coordination are quite similar, visual motor integration is a more complex activity and plays into reading in many different ways. For instance, visual motor integration utilizes eye-hand coordination, but it also involves other visual perceptual skills such as size perception, figure-ground awareness, sequential memory, and visualization.
Visual Closure:
Visual closure is the ability to visualize a complete image or object when only a portion of it can be seen. It is a visual perceptual skill and allows us to visualize in our “mind’s eye” to decide what the whole object or image will be.
If your child is weak in this skill, then the eyes will individually process every letter or word while reading. This is a clunky, slow process that decreases reading fluency scores. It also affects comprehension, because the laborious decoding takes so much effort that the reader’s focus isn’t placed on meaning.
Seeing Parts of Wholes
In addition, if your child is struggling with visual closure, only part of a letter, word, or number might be seen while reading. For instance, part of the letter, word, or number might be erased, misprinted, or covered by a random piece of paper.
Your child will pause to make a guess at what the letter, word, or number might be instead of letting the brain automatically fill in the missing gaps. This stops the flow of reading, interrupts decoding, and decreases fluency scores. If suffering from poor visual closure skills, your child will also lack the ability to predict what letters and words are coming next in a sentence.
If your child struggles with visual closure, it will also be difficult to write letters and numbers. Letters of the alphabet aren’t instantly recognized if this skill is weak. Your child has to visually work to make the image a whole every time it’s seen instead of letting the brain instantly fill in missing pieces upon seeing it.
Visual Discrimination:
Visual discrimination is one of the most important visual skills when it comes to reading, especially decoding. It allows your child to see subtle differences between objects, images, or figures. Since letters and numbers fall into the category of objects, images, or figures, reading, writing, spelling, and math are all greatly affected by this visual processing skill.
Similarities and Differences
If your child is weak in visual processing, it will be difficult to tell the difference between similar letters, such as “h” and “n”. This obviously would change the meaning of a word, which affects comprehension in a negative way. It would also affect reading fluency, as your child would hesitate when realizing the mistake or read the word wrong entirely, both which affect fluency scores.
Following is an example of how visual discrimination errors can change the meaning of text:
Example 1:
Example 2:
If your child struggles with visual discrimination, then focusing on the individual letters of a word while looking at it won’t take place. Your child might also fail to notice likenesses and differences between words as wholes. Perhaps “b” might be seen as “d”, or “bad” as “bed”. This obviously can contribute to reversals issues as well.
Lapses in Visual Acuity
These lapses in acuity are enough to make your child pause while reading, which slows down fluency and interrupts the flow of learning. It also directly changes the meaning of the letter or word, making it a “misread”. This causes comprehension scores to tank because meaning is obviously changed.
Visual discrimination problems are common with students who have dyslexia, dysgraphia, or dyscalculia.
Visual Memory:
Visual memory is the ability to hold pictures or images in the mind. In order to read, write, perform accurate math calculations, and spell words properly, your child needs to hold symbols in visual memory. These symbols may be letters, combinations of letters (words), combinations of words (sentences), combinations of sentences (paragraphs), numbers, number combinations, formulas, math facts, spelling words, and variations of different meanings that accompany these symbols.
Whew! When you look at that list, it’s amazing that any of us can read, write, spell, or remember how to add, subtract, multiply or divide!
When Skills Don’t Naturally Develop
For most kids, visual memory skills develop naturally. But if your child has dyslexia or another visual processing issue, visual memory skills can be weak, making the above mentioned skills difficult. Reading is hard, especially decoding and comprehension. Test scores are low, and grades suffer.
Your child should be able to hold one symbol in visual memory for each year of age until age seven. This means that a seven-year old child should be able to hold seven images in visual memory. Any child older than seven should also hold seven images or symbols in memory.
Since each letter of a word is a symbol, this visual memory ability enables your child to sound out multi-syllable words which often contain around seven letters.
If your child has a visual memory issue, it’s as though there isn’t enough “glue” in the brain to hold these symbols in place. This affects how your child reads. If only three or four images can be held in visual memory, then a child will only be able to read three and four letter words with ease. If the word has more than three or four letters, the “glue” just isn’t there.
Even though these kids with visual memory issues are often bright, their reading and academic performance suffers because of it.
Eye Muscle Movement:
If your child is struggling to read, it might be because of weak eye muscles. Did you know we have two eyeballs, each held in place by six muscles? These twelve muscles control the movement of the eye, and if the movements are jumping or jerking, it will be difficult for your child to focus on the print of a book or page.
Perceiving Information Incorrectly
If this happens, then most likely, your child will perceive the text or print incorrectly. The words or letters might seem to be moving, jumping, or jerking. Halos or shadows might wrap around the words. The print might run uphill or downhill. Many other “distortions” can happen.
When your child’s eye muscles are weak, it’s difficult to fluidly sweep the eyes across a page while reading. When this happens, then reading fluency is affected, as it takes longer than expected to decode the words. It’s simply too laborious. Comprehension is also affected because your child is focusing so hard on the actual decoding that focus isn’t placed on meaning.
Suppression:
Suppression is the intermittent “shutting” down of an eye by the brain. If your child has suppression issues, the stronger eye will take over while the weaker eye continues to lose its effectiveness, popping in and out of your child’s field of vision.
Of course, eye muscle weakness isn’t the only cause of suppression, but this can really make reading hard for your child. Although your child most likely won’t notice when suppression happens, it’s a “glitch” in the flow of learning. A minuscule pause takes place while the brain switches your child’s vision off and then on.
It’s On Again and Off Again…Without Notice
Suppression will obviously affect how your child is able to not only read but to write and perform other academic skills as well. If your child has poor reading fluency, suppression might be part of the cause, as one of the eyes is going “blind” at times. Because of this, it’s difficult for your child to keep up with the necessary decoding skills that must go on for grade level fluency norms.
Accommodation:
Accommodation is the ability to focus the eyes from far to near in an easy, fluid manner. This is most frequently seen where your child is sitting in a desk at school while looking at the board. Your child might have to then write down a note from the lecture. If accommodation skills are weak, your child will have a difficult time regaining focus while looking at the new place of focus – the book or notebook on the desk.
It Makes School a Nightmare!
If your child has poor accommodation skills, school is a difficult, frustrating place. It’s too hard to transition from the board then back to the notebook on the desk, take appropriate notes, then look back up to the board. With poor accommodation skills, your child is always a step or two behind, never feeling caught up or fully understanding what is going on in class.
Accommodation doesn’t have to take place from a large surface like the board and then back to a smaller surface like a book on a desk. Copying notes from a textbook into a notebook is another example of accommodation. Even reading involves a bit of accommodation. When your child reads on one page and then transitions to another page, a dose of accommodation takes place.
If there are weaknesses, then your child is a beat behind everyone else while trying to adjust focus on the new page. This is enough to affect reading fluency, slowing down reading times due to a “glitch” in processing.
It’s a Focusing Issue
Accommodation is a focusing issue, although regular glasses won’t usually correct this problem. Children with accommodation issues can practice focusing from near to far and back again – over and over again – to strengthen this important visual processing skill.
Visual Perception Skills:
Visual perception skills are the brain’s interpretation of what has been seen. It’s highly important that the brain and visual system connect so it’s easy to perceive visual stimuli. If your child has poor visual perception skills, then visual information will be seen in a distorted, incorrect way. It is skewed, coming in at odd angles, upside down, or moving and wiggling.
If your child has weak visual perception skills, then it will be difficult to tell the difference between written letters, words, and punctuation marks. These are all symbols used in reading.
Perceiving Information Incorrectly
If these symbols aren’t perceived correctly, then it’s difficult to be a fluent reader. Your child will stammer and stutter, working too hard to decipher the codes of our language. Comprehension suffers as well, as meaning is changed when these symbols are perceived incorrectly.
Writing, spelling, and math also take a hit with poor visual perception skills. If your child is bright and verbal, but grades don’t reflect potential, it might be a vision perceptual issue, especially if decoding words is difficult.
Visual Figure Ground:
Visual figure ground is the ability to focus on and identify a specific item as separate from its background. If your child has weak visual figure ground skills, then it will be difficult to tell the difference between objects and the background they are up against.
Strong visual figure ground skills enable your child to locate precise visual information in the midst of a cluttered context and filter out irrelevant surrounding items. Difficulties occur when your child is unable to identify objects from the surfaces they are on or from other objects which overlap against them.
Searching for Information is Hard
If your child has poor visual figure ground perception, then it is difficult to find specific text on a page or to distinguish between letters with a similar appearance, such lowercase “n”, and “r”.
Obviously, this mis-perception affects your child’s ability to read, write, spell, and perform math computations correctly. It is simply too difficult to judge where letters and numbers start and finish, how to weed out unimportant visual stimuli, and how to make sense of the jumble that appears to them in a variety of different ways.
Visual Motor Integration:
Visual motor integration is the ability to coordinate visual perceptual skills with gross and fine motor movements while integrating visual input with motor output. Whew! That’s a mouthful! An easier to understand definition is simply…the ability for the eyes, the hands, and the brain to communicate with each other in an efficient manner.
If your child struggles with visual motor integration skills, then writing will be difficult. It will be difficult keeping letters on the lines as well as forming cohesive sentences and paragraphs. In addition, handwriting will be poor or illegible.
It Carries Over Into Other Subjects as Well
Obviously, writing carries over into spelling and math, so these subjects will also reflect this struggle. Math problems won’t line up correctly, so the answer is often wrong, even though the process and computation might have been done correctly. Artwork will be messy or immature.
Your child’s writing might bunch together without spacing between words. Or, the words might flow up or downhill, making it difficult to read. Copying from the board or from one surface to another might be a struggle as well.
Since visual motor integration involves processing visual stimuli, reading can be affected, too. There is a small amount of motor function required to read – such as turning a page. This can slow your child down. In addition, if your child has a visual motor integration issue, the eyes and the brain need to communicate, and that communication might be delayed, skewed, or processing information correctly.
This affects both fluency and comprehension, as meaning gets changed when visual information isn’t processed correctly. Overall, if visual motor integration skills are weak, your child’s grades will suffer.
Visual Sequential Memory:
Visual sequential memory is the ability to recall objects or figures in the order originally seen. If your child has weak visual sequential memory, then letters will be missing in words or words might be reversed or transposed. Your child might also add letters to words. This of course, affects reading, writing, and spelling.
For math, it might be difficult to remember formulas, steps in problems such as long division, and recall math facts.
Misreading Words
Reading can be affected by poor visual sequential memory skills as well. Your child will misread words because the lineup of the letters gets confused. It’s difficult to remember what the meaning of words are because the letters are mixed up within the word, misplaced, or have missing letters.
Obviously, both fluency and comprehension are affected by poor visual sequential memory because words are read incorrectly. If your child struggles with this skill, then backtracking becomes the norm. Incorrect or missing information is read and this slows down the flow of learning.
Saccadic Eye Movement:
Saccadic eye movements are rapid motions made by the eyes. These movements will quickly and abruptly change the point of fixation as your child’s eyes move across a page while reading. This sounds very complicated, but really, it’s just the stopping and starting of the eyes as they fix on symbols while moving.
If you look out into space and then look down at your phone, your eyes moved, fixating on the end point – your phone. This is actually an example of saccadic eye movements on a broad sense. As far as reading is concerned, it’s important how your child’s eyes move across a page, those stops and starts doing exactly what they are intended to do.
Eye Movements Should be Smooth and Fluid
As mentioned before, we want the movements to be fluid while reading. As your child’s eye picks up information, such as noticing a capital letter or a punctuation mark, it will stop for the briefest moment, fixating on the symbol. It then gets right back to flowing smoothly across the page until another stop is necessary.
When everything works right, it will go as described above. But if your child has problems with saccadic eye movements then the pauses might be too long. The stops too abrupt. The motions not fluid when reverting back to sweeping across the page.
Once again, this is enough to interrupt the flow of learning.
Saccadic eye movements can range from minuscule (like sighting in on a particular letter) to more broad movements (like looking across a room or out into space). They can occur voluntarily but also happen as a reflex.
Efficient reading involves the coordination of the eyes with the cognitive system as these saccadic movements take place. The cognitive system is responsible for choosing the target then communicating to the eye that it must move after stopping on the chosen target. The eye muscles are responsible for the actual movement taking place.
Spatial Awareness:
Spatial awareness is an organized awareness of objects in space around us as well as an awareness of our body’s position in space. Without this awareness, your child would not be able to do something as simple as pick food up from a plate and place in the mouth. Even reading is affected. It’s difficult to see letters in correct relation to each other and to the page if spatial awareness skills aren’t strong.
Spatial awareness requires that we have a model of the three-dimensional space around us, and it requires that we can integrate information from all of our senses.
Creativity and Spatial Skills
Studies have suggested a link between a well-developed sense of spatial awareness and artistic creativity as well as success in math. It can also be important in organizing and classifying abstract mental concepts in space. Visual thinkers, in particular, will tend to use spatial awareness to organize abstract thought.
Strong spatial awareness skills help your child visualize images in the mind, which helps promote visual memory skills. This helps your child retain information that was read, which in turn, raises reading comprehension scores.
If your child struggles with spatial awareness, then math and executive functioning skills might be difficult. Obviously, fine motor skills would be affected, and this carries over to handwriting as well.
Even Social Skills are Affected!
Even social skills can be affected by poor spatial awareness abilities. Kids with poor spatial skills don’t understand personal space and will often interfere with someone else’s “space bubble”. This can lead to peers shying away from them. These kids also have a more difficult time reading facial expressions and other visual cues that lead to proper social awareness skills.
If your child struggles with spatial awareness, the jigsaw puzzles might be avoided at all costs. Even playing with Legos might not be a fun activity! That’s because it’s difficult to see how these shapes form together in space.
Binocular Teaming:
Binocular teaming is the process of both eyes working together, providing accurate information to the brain. Binocular teaming and stereopsis (the working together of both eyes to provide different but integrated views to the brain which are translated into one clear image) are important visual processing skills.
Together, they are responsible for providing depth perception. Depth perception is the ability to see things in three dimensions, including length, width, and depth. This enables you to judge how far away or up close an object is in space.
Depth Perception Matters!
If your child has poor depth perception because of binocular teaming issues, then words on a page can appear to be jumping or moving about. They might be blurry or hazy. Halos or shadows might appear around the letters or words. Your child might fidget or become restless while reading or doing school work. This makes it difficult to follow the words on a page while reading and exhaustion sets in.
If your child can only read a paragraph or two before wanting to stop, binocular teaming issues might be the problem. This affects reading fluency, because your child can’t keep up with the demands of grade level expectations. The process of decoding words that aren’t holding still is just too difficult.
Reading comprehension takes a hit as well. It’s too easy to misread words and transpose letters when the print isn’t holding still. Mistakes are made that directly and indirectly affect meaning. Your child will be so tired from the process of decoding that focusing on meaning is simply too difficult.
Of course, all areas of schoolwork are affected by binocular teaming issues, not just reading. Spelling, writing, and math are all affected because the visual information being taken in isn’t accurate.
Directionality:
Students with dyslexia and other visual processing problems often suffer with directionality issues. Directionality is the ability to understand and use directions such as left, right, over, under, beside, and above.
If your child struggles with directionality issues, then it’s difficult to understand where objects are in relation to the body. Your child might seem “lost” a lot of the time, unorganized, and confused when given oral directions. Often, clumsiness is an issue.
Writing and Reversals
Written work might reveal a lot of reversals as well. This affects letters, words, and numbers. When your child reads out loud, letters and words are reversed. (Check out our free reading and writing reversals evaluations if you want to find out exactly which letters and numbers your child is reversing!)
Directionality issues certainly affect reading. It’s hard for children with directionality issues to start reading at the top of the page and continue in a left to right fashion. It’s like they get lost along the way and have a difficult time staying on task. They “weasel” their way out of reading and wander off, the task too difficult for them.
If your child struggles with directionality, the words on a page are often reversed, transposed, and not perceived the way they are in print. Of course, poor directionality skills affect reading fluency, since decoding is such a laborious task. Your child will stumble over words, and this slows down expected fluency expectations. In addition, comprehension takes a hit because so many words are misread. These errors change the meaning of the text. Tests aren’t passed and grades suffer.
Simple Tasks can Cause Tantrums
If your child has directionality issues, then doing something as simple as a worksheet can cause problems, ending in tantrums, meltdowns, or retreating. This is because it’s too difficult to determine where to start on the page and how to move through the page in a logical sequence.
If your child doesn’t start at the top left hand side of a page and move through each line from left to right, it might be a directionality issue. It’s difficult to do this simple task, and your child ends up skipping around all over the place. Of course, this results in incorrect answers as too many questions and problems are skipped over.
Visual Synthesis
Visual synthesis is the ability to pull visual bits of information together. The brain then interprets it as a whole image. Visual synthesis is similar to visual figure ground except there isn’t necessarily something in the background distracting the learner from figuring out what the figure or object is.
Order is important for visual synthesis, so obviously it affects reading. If visual synthesis is weak, the reader might mix up letters or see them as the wrong size. Capitals might appear as lower case letters.
If your child has poor visual synthesis, then only parts of letters or words might be seen. Or the order of those letters might be mixed up. This, obviously, affects reading fluency as decoding is quite difficult to do.
Sounding out Words is Laborious
Sounding out words is hard because the letters of the words aren’t necessarily lined up properly or in the right order. Since words are not read or decoded correctly, meaning is changed and reading comprehension suffers.
If your child struggles with visual synthesis, then writing and other skills are affected as well. It’s difficult to recall and place letters in correct order, so even getting a sentence down on paper might be a challenge. Lining up math problems and using math formulas can be equally as hard.
Overcoming Visual Processing Issues that Affect Reading
Bravo! Reading offers two ways to help your child overcome visual processing issues that affect reading and learning!
Seeing for Reading Pack
The “Seeing” for Reading Pack will gives your child the tools to make visual processing skills easy. More than 250 pages of fun, colorful activities arrive as a digital file so you can get going right away!
Your child will master these visual processing skills in the “Seeing” for Reading Pack: visual discrimination, visual synthesis, visual figure ground, visual motor integration, visual tracking, visual spatial memory, visual closure, and visual memory.
These visual processing skills are the main processing skills that affect reading and decoding. Your child needs to be able to discriminate between shapes (letters and words) in order to decode. Visual synthesis is another skill that we cover to help your child organize information visually so it can be perceived correctly.
Visual Processing Skills Affect Learning!
Visual motor integration skills are important for your child, too. The “Seeing” for Reading Pack helps your child organize communication between the eyes, the hand, and the brain. This carries over into reading decoding, fluency, and comprehension.
Visual tracking skills are extremely important for kids with dyslexia or those who struggle with reading or visual processing skills. The exercises in the “Seeing” for Reading Pack will train your child’s eyes to sweep across a page with ease, which makes decoding and reading a much easier process!
Visual spatial memory helps your child perceive, analyze, understand, store, and recall visual information. The “Seeing” for Reading Pack is chock full of fun, easy activities that will help your child’s reading decoding and comprehension skills.
We also include visual closure skills in the “Seeing” for Reading Pack so your child can learn to read letters and words even when parts of them are missing. This helps reading fluency, as there won’t be those pauses in reading that stop the flow of learning if recognition is instant and automatic.
And finally, we add several activities that include visual memory. This skill is vitally important for reading decoding, fluency, and comprehension, as it helps your child remember letters, words, and punctuation marks while reading.
Combining Two Systems
When joining the “Seeing” for Reading Pack with the Bravo! Reading System, your child’s reading scores will soar. Our reading program focuses on helping your child master decoding skills in a brain-based, movement based, multisensory way to compensate for weak visual and auditory processing skills, something that most kids with dyslexia suffer from.
Even better, kids love using the “Seeing” for Reading Pack because it’s fun and colorful. You can either print off the pages or use the digital file on a tablet or computer.
Improve Your Child’s Visual Processing Skills with the Race from Reversals Pack
If your child reverses letters, words, or numbers, then the Race from Reversals Pack will help! Teacher approved, this digital learning pack arrives immediately so you can help your child learn proper letter and number directions right away. Although this innovative expansion pack can be used on a computer or a tablet, we recommend printing the pages so your child can get gross motor skills involved.
By using brain based learning, gross motor skills, color, pictures, auditory and visual cues, and extremely large letters, the Race from Reversals pack helps your child overcome directionality issues as well as learn “for good”!
The use of stop and go signs are automatic and familiar, leading your child right onto the letter path! Your child will relish using the auditory “saying” cloud for each letter or number, which makes the Race from Reversals Pack a multisensory program to end reversals once and for all!
Multisensory is Where it’s At!
In addition, your child will use numbered buttons, special buttons, and arrows to navigate the letter or number path.
The Race from Reversals pack uses humungeous letters with dot dabbers or bingo markers so your child can use large motor movements to end reversals. Most kids with dyslexia are tactile learners, so that means they learn by doing, not seeing or hearing. By using these extra letters, your child will learn in a way that works! The dot dabbers are just a plus!
Get the “Seeing” for Reading Pack and the Race from Reversals Pack with the Complete Bravo! Reading System and Save Money!
Order the Complete Bravo! Reading System, which includes the Race from Reversals Pack, and save money! When you order the Complete Bravo! Reading System, you receive all eleven levels of the Bravo! Reading System, the Bravo! Beginner and all of the Bravo! Reading Expansion Packs.
The expansion packs you receive are the Bravo! Booster Pack, the Bravo! Super Booster Pack, the Bravo! Decoder Pack, the Bravo! Race from Reversals Pack, and the Bravo! “Seeing” for Reading Pack.
The Eleven Levels of the Bravo! Reading System
The Bravo! Beginner and Bravo! Expansion Packs
Total Value: $1969.83
All for $399.99.
