In December 2010, we found out our then five year old had amblyopia and strambismus. She had been to the optometrist at the age of three, so she was due for an exam. Her condition at the time left her with 20/400 vision, which is legally blind. At her last exam in April, she had with glasses 20/40-20/60. We have a goal to improve her vision to 20/20 without glasses, however, that is purely a goal, and up to God’s healing.
Well, this past week, we had more vision exams for our children. Our soon to be 12 old got new glasses, and we found out our now five year old, who was screened in March, likely has the same issues, plus a few more then our now six year old mentioned above. We go back to the optometrist on Wednesday for more testing, and to get an idea of our treatment plan.
What does this mean for homeschooling?
- I made a change in our school almost immediately that I would not add our 3.5 yr old to the K-1st grade group. There is a huge blessing to that, as it is my K-1st who have the vision challenges.
- They will be able to use the same curriculum, and will most likely be able to do vision therapy together.
- I had always planned to school them together, and this just keeps it a little more likely
- We will be doing lots more hands on learning then originally planned
- Lots of Dry Erase Crayon Use on homemade printables that have been laminated
- We will be doing lots of lapbooks, some of which I plan to make myself, and send back to my ladies at AJTL to possibly sell.
I am not finding any materials on the web for these children. This means, I will be creating a lot of my own. If you know of some, please let me know. I appreciate your prayers as I head into this next journey God has chosen me to follow.
I just now saw this blog post and wanted to let you know that we have almost the same issue with our daughter! We discovered at almost 5 years old that she didn’t see well. She was given a 20/400 vision score and glasses. She also was required to wear a patch over her “good” eye for a couple hours each day to help strengthen her “bad” eye. (They are both bad… just one is considerable worse and had been basically “turned off” by her brain.) Long story short… she is now 9 1/2 and we have her to 20/30. The original goal was 20/50 with glasses… the legal requirement to be able to drive! We met that in about 18 months. The eye doc seems confident that 20/20 with glasses is achievable in the next couple of years.
If any of your kids need patches for their eyes, I highly recommend FrameHuggers. The company was great to work with and the patch is SO much better than a “pirate” style. http://www.framehuggers.com/
Prayers for great results in all their eye treatments, whatever they may be.
Reading this post, I would say that your children are lucky to have a parents like you. Giving unconditional love and so much patience for them. Keep up the good work wonder mom’s.
Elaine recently posted..Unable To Get Pregnant
Appreciate you efforts for those kids, keep the good work up. And you can always have Govt and NGOs to support and fund you.They might guide you better.
Stacy recently posted..Medical Assistant
My youngest child is visually impaired. She is 3 and we adopted her from China almost two years ago. On my blog I chronicle the activities I do for her homeschool. One of my favorite sites is wonderbaby.org
Please tell me more about vision therapy. Our son has strabismus, amblyopia and latent nystagmus. He is now 8 and his younger sister is beginning to surpass him due to his vision issues. I’ve heard a bit about vision therapy but would like to know more.