Wow Vision Therapy Blog

In this success story, Audra explains how vision therapy corrected the underlying vision dysfunctions that were slowing down her son’s reading fluency.

By: Audra (Ben’s Mom)

Ben, age 9, has always accelerated in sports, math, writing, reading comprehension, and relationships with people. His teachers and coaches have always commented about how he’s a hard worker with determination and perseverance. It was exciting to hear from his teachers how well he was doing year after year, but at the same time, there was one concern that kept showing up….his reading fluency. Ben could decode words and comprehend with ease, but his reading was very slow. His teachers seemed to think that it would click at some point, but as his mom and a special education teacher with a Masters in Reading, I didn’t think it would click without a different type of intervention. I had already tried many strategies and repeated reading activities to help him, but nothing seemed to work.

In third grade, he scored very low on the beginning of the year DIBELS reading fluency assessment and started making comments that he couldn’t keep up with the pace of the class, especially all the reading. He was getting frustrated and discouraged quickly. At that point, I knew we had to do something different. I remembered hearing about Vision Therapy and started researching it on the internet. I found Wow Vision Therapy and gave the office a call right away. I was impressed that I had to answer questions before they agreed to the first appointment. I appreciated that they screened patients and didn’t waste our time and money. It was so intriguing to learn that Ben struggled with Accommodative Dysfunction and Esophoria. It was amazing to see how much he excelled in some areas of the assessments and then struggled with other areas. Those areas of struggle impacted reading fluency. Ben started Vision Therapy at the beginning of November. At first, we went twice a week and then dropped back to once a week. He was also prescribed bifocal reading glasses.

Watching Ben change as a reader this year has been a complete blessing. We actually have a reader now! It makes me teary-eyed to realize we now have a confident reader because of Vision Therapy. He is now on grade level with his reading fluency. He never complains about keeping up with the pace of his classroom and the reading requirements. We used to force him to read nightly and bribe him to get him to do his monthly reading requirement for school. Now he reads without being asked. If he’s had a busy night of sports and we don’t let him read before bed (because it’s so late!), he gets teary-eyed. He recently read through a bunch of books from a series that we had bought a while ago and was so excited to go to the bookstore to buy more books. We’ve never seen him that excited to buy books. He has gained even more confidence in school, and even though he continues to attack each day with grit, we can tell he does it with a little more confidence in himself thanks to all the reading improvements he’s made this year.

Disclaimer: The patient, parent or guardian in this story has authorized the use and disclosure of the patient’s name, photographic/video images, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment plan, and/or patient testimonial.

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