Monday, December 27, 2010

2nd Optometrist Appointment

Tomorrow Stacey goes for her 2nd appointment with the Optometrist, to use the Intuitive Colorimeter to determine the exact shade she needs for her Irlen glasses. She's excited and so am I... more because I'm hoping that this will make a difference to her reading speed and her comfort with reading books.

We are going with the lenses simply because since it was obvious the overlays helped, this will hopefully help her in reading things off the board, off the computer screen as well as when she is doing her exams and having to write on white paper as well. If her brain doesn't have to work so hard compensating for the perceptual "interference", then it can apply itself to the task of comprehension and expression better, I suppose. In other countries, you can request that the schools support you by printing on coloured paper (notes, test papers and so on), but I think for that to happen in Singapore, you'd need to find yourself a teacher who is willing to go that far out for you... and while there are many many lovely teachers in her school, I wouldn't dream of asking them to go to that extent just for one child, when I can simply help her by giving her the filters right there in front of her eyes.

So far, she's preferred books where the print are nice and big and the line spacing is also far apart. This means that she normally ends up with books for younger readers. I've tried buying her books meant for kids her age, but she dislikes certain kinds of print... font that are too small, or the words look too "crowded"... she has steadfastly avoided all such print. So I'm hoping that with the Irlen glasses, we can "graduate" to books meant for bigger girls, and she can then be exposed to more ideas and sentence structures and hopefully that will help her more in her writing and expression as well.

Ah well. We'll see. I better not count my chickens before they hatch. :p

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