E100: Vision is More than 20/20 with Jamie Spencer
Welcome to the extra-special 100th episode of The Parent IEP Lab Podcast! My very special guest is Jamie Spencer of Miss Jamie, OT. She is explaining the aspects of vision that aren't common knowledge that just may be impacting your child's ability to learn. We cover: 1) What is functional vision?
Welcome to the extra-special 100th episode of The Parent IEP Lab Podcast! My very special guest is Jaime Spencer of Miss Jaime, OT. She is explaining the aspects of vision that aren’t common knowledge that just may be impacting your child’s ability to learn.
We cover:
1) What is functional vision?
2) 3 Aspects of Vision (more than acuity or glasses!)
3) What professional to seek for diagnosis
4) Example treatment, goals, and accommodations!
Register for The IEP Bootcamp January 27-19th *Recordings provided
Link to Miss Jaime OT’s Eye Reminder Handout
E100: Miss Jaime, OT
[00:00:00] Welcome to a very special hundredth episode of the parent IEP lab podcast. I have the most special topic for you today, and a very special guest to come on and spread the word about vision and how it affects learning. So if you have a child that is dyslexic, is an ADHD or is autistic, has a specific learning disability I could go on and on, but you get the gist.
You may benefit from listening to this episode and get some real clear action steps. If you feel like you want to check this out for your child to see if it’s affecting their learning. So stay tuned because we are talking about how vision is much more than 2020 and how we can see pun intended. If children really need some help seeing what they are trying to learn in order to be able to learn, stick with me.
You are listening to the parent IEP lab, the podcast that helps you get an effective IEP plan for your child so that you can get them supported and learning in school. I’m Beth Liesenfeld occupational [00:01:00] therapist, who started to notice trends in parents who got effective IEP for their kids. Without having to fight the school.
My mission is to help you turn insider knowledge from the school side into effective parent advocacy for your child. The parent IEP lab focuses on providing you the knowledge about your parent role in the IEP and taking away the stress of an upcoming IEP meeting
through the online course, the ultimate parent IEP prep course. But also on the podcast we highlight commonly missed parent advocacy opportunities between IEP meetings, which is really how you avoid having to fight with the team. So let’s dive in and think about what we can change and tweak to get the right formula for success for your child to learn and grow at school. Welcome to the lab.
You are officially invited to the IEP bootcamp happening January 27th to 29th, 2023. If you have been avoiding looking at your child’s IEP because you are too overwhelmed by where to start to understand it, or how to tell if it’s a good [00:02:00] IEP or not, then this is the training for you. We are getting together for the weekend for super short trainings once per day.
To help, you know what you’re looking at when you get a draft IEP, or if you’re just trying to look at your child’s final IEP. Even though the trainings are live over zoom, you will have the recordings for life in your learning portal and all of this for just $19. You can get more [email protected] slash bootcamp or the link to check it out is below this episode in your podcast player, see you there.
I typically jump right into the episode, but this is a super special episode because it’s our hundredth one. So I’m telling a little story here to explain why I picked vision as my hundredth episode topic. So. When I first found out about online courses, I was a new mom and I took a sleep training course for our six-month-old.
Which I failed miserably, but it still got me through the tough parts. And I picked up a lot of helpful hints and tricks, even though [00:03:00] I didn’t follow it to a T. So as I moved on from this experience of having the online course and being able to look at it at 11:00 PM, when my child was screaming and I didn’t know how to help him.
I just kind of took this experience with me that, you know, parents are in a similar situation where you might only have 11:00 PM to learn about IEP is to learn about how to support your child. And so I just thought it was just wonderful on demand kind of situation where you could learn virtually anything.
So fast forward, I worked in the schools over the next few weeks after that. And I was in a few staff team meetings. And the case managers were going through their new evaluations. So three times that week I heard the magic profile words. Yeah, we’re going to test only for reading. There’s really no other concerns. Well, they have some attention challenges too.
We’ve been watching them for awhile and it’s just time to test. And I always raised my hand and I said, can I screen [00:04:00] them for ocular motor skills? And now the team at this point knew that this was an obsession of mine, but I loved looking at this for kids that I loved figuring out how to make this a little bit easier for them. So the team had been used to me doing these screenings.
And fortunately, many of them were super interested in having this information. They found it really interesting too, and it gave them a different thing to look for. Oh, all of a sudden, we’re not just talking about reading, being hard. It’s their eyes that are having trouble too. So it gave them a new perspective on why this child was struggling so much.
And I had gotten so good at seeing the red flags for this, without even knowing the kid that many times I was finding the child, you know, I would pull them and they would be rubbing their eyes or they would tell me that they would rub their eyes by the end of the day or they couldn’t follow a moving object in front of their face, or they were skipping over words when they were reading.
And they were missing targets when it was holding up in front of them, like two pencils. And I asked them to jump their eyes back and forth. They [00:05:00] missed them. They couldn’t see them out of the corner of their eye. And all three of these kids in particular this week, I found something in looking at their functional vision that they were struggling with. And I was able to recommend getting an assessment from their eye doctor and recommending accommodations in their IEP so with this online course thing, I thought, oh my gosh, how many kids are struggling with this?
It’s everywhere. I didn’t realize that until I started looking for it. And now I’m seeing it absolutely everywhere. And how many parents don’t even know that this is a thing. So they’re saying, oh yeah, my child struggles in reading, but we’re not even thinking about looking at the eyes to see if there is something that we can help support them with through the movement of their eyes. So how many disabilities and, you know, self-esteem of the child, could we preserve by getting this information out there and just saying, Hey parents, this is a thing.
This is how you look for it, or this is where you go to see if this is affecting your child’s learning. And so when I [00:06:00] started my online business in late 2020, I thought my course was going to be a parent course to understand vision challenges. And, you know, as many ideas do, I took a course to make a course, to like validate my idea, see if it was a thing that people would Google or search for. And, you know, I ended up not going with that vision piece because it’s just not well-known.
And I didn’t feel like this was, you know, something that I could talk about in a podcast or a blog for years and years. So I also, you know, Did this list of things that I thought were issues and did a lot of research about what was out there. And I finally landed on a business that helped parents advocate through IEP, which is
you know why you’re here. This is how you found me. So I kind of tabled that vision idea. And there were so many times where I’ve thought to have an episode about this, but it’s so special that I wanted this incredible [00:07:00] amazing episode. And I kept having doubts about being able to deliver that to you. So with the hundredth episode coming up quick, I reached out to an expert that I have been following for years, Miss Jaime, O.T.
And she was kind enough to come on the show to teach us all about how vision is much more than 2020, and how it affects learning as well as what you, as the parent can do. If you want to get your child’s functional vision checked out. So I’m so excited to have Miss Jaime, O.T. on the show. She’s been an OT for many, many years, and she has so much great experience.
And she is, has been very inspiring to me because I’ve always seen her out there doing online courses for other OTs about vision. And I’m just really excited to have her on the show. So. I think that’s enough of an intro. Hopefully you got a little bit of an insight on how important I feel like this is. And I’m so very excited to bring you this interview with Miss Jaime, O.T.
I am so [00:08:00] excited to have Miss Jaime OT on the podcast today. So welcome. I would love to just start with you explaining your background and before we dive into vision stuff, but you can also kind of go into how you got. Passionate about looking at vision challenges for kids too, but I’m so excited you’re here.
Sure. My name is Jaime Spencer. I’ve been a school-based occupational therapist for 22 years, and I’m an AOTA-approved provider, which means I provide continuing education for other school-based occupational therapists as I. On my journey learning how to be a better school O.T., I took a lot of courses and one course that particularly stood out to me was vision in the school setting, and it was taught by Robert Constantine, and I was just really wowed by his wealth of knowledge, by all of the things that I realized I may have been missing.
You know, vision is a really important part of [00:09:00] our functioning of everyone’s functioning. Yeah. So for our children, it’s very hard to learn if you can’t see what you’re looking at. And there was just a lot of reflection, uh, when in when I was taking his course and being like, oh my goodness, I almost like guilty, like, did I have kids with all these issues and I didn’t even know how to look for it or, or how to check for it or what the symptoms were.
So I became very passionate and when I became an AOTA approved provider, my very first course that I wanted to offer for school-based OTs was vision for school OTs in the classroom, because I know that I hadn’t really had any training about it. So I didn’t know what to look for, what to do, how to treat it.
Mm-hmm. and how to educate the teachers or the parents. Mm-hmm. So I worked with Robert to put together that course and it has just really kind of evolved. It’s been about four years now. We’ve given the course eight times and we’ve had hundreds of school-based occupational therapists go through the [00:10:00] training, which is just wonderful because it’s so important. The knowledge is so important for our school-based professionals to have that out there and to be able to help the parents. And of course our main goal is to get the kids functioning and learning and doing, being as independent as they can be. So we need to work together on that note. And that was why we came out with that course.
So Robert definitely was a very big mentor to me and, he did the course with me, but, I’m just very proud of it and it’s come along. Yeah. That’s amazing. So, and, and I can’t remember how I got keyed into this, because again, like you say, like we don’t learn about this in class necessarily, but we do learn about the brain and how it functions.
And I remember going through neuroanatomy and seeing how complicated those nerves are that come from each eye, and then they cross in the middle of the brain and they go to different parts in your brain. and I just thought, oh [00:11:00] my gosh, there’s gotta be a lot of stuff that can go wrong because of how yes, they track in the brain.
So when we say vision, I’m, I am not good at explaining this because when I try to explain the vision piece to parents, they will say, oh yeah, like they need glasses. And I’ll be like, no, no, no, it’s much more than that. And then I tend to explain it, and then at the end, Oh yeah. So they might need glasses, so.
Awesome. Well, I wonder if you could do, I, I’m sure that you can do a better job of explaining. Okay, so there’s vision that’s acuity that we all think of, of having glasses. Mm-hmm. . Um, but would you mind telling us the other things that we’re looking for when we talk about functional vision?
Yes. Explain that a little bit better than me. Okay. . So the old way of thinking, and you know, some doctors probably still follow this model. Mm-hmm. is the one component model of vision, which is acuity. Mm-hmm. . Updated and more research. And you know, lots of things have developed since then, [00:12:00] and most people are following the three-component model.
So the three-component model of vision is visual acuity. So that’s the, the first one. Um, and we’re looking at the, the health of the eye. Is the eye healthy? And can the children see clearly? Yes. Very important. 2020, but yes, yes. But then we’re taking it a step further and we’re looking at their visual efficiency.
So the child might have glasses and may be able to see 2020, but now we’re looking at something else. We’re looking at how, um, are their eyes moving? How are their muscles in their eyes working together? Are they working together? Mm-hmm. , are they able to shift from looking far to looking near? Are they able to shift from left to right smoothly and easily because they’re not just moving those muscle.
Left to right. They’re also trying to comprehend the words that they’re seeing, trying to decode and decipher and remember in order [00:13:00] to form a story that they’re reading or all these other things that are going on cognitively, if their eyes aren’t the open gates that they need to be and they’re not working properly, it could be a big dysfunction for the child.
So that’s visual efficiency. Mm-hmm. . . So that’s different. And then the last piece is visual information processing, which we generally say it’s visual perception. Mm-hmm. . So visual perception is how our brain makes sense of what our eyes see. And it’s a, it’s a very big umbrella, but it incorporates. Visual memory, it incorporates being able to tease out something in a busy background, like a child who’s looking for a certain school supply mm-hmm.
and they can’t, because it’s so messed up in their desk that they, it’s just not popping out at them. We also have, being able to recognize a picture when it’s not complete. . But they might notice that the child doesn’t recognize their favorite stuffed animal unless the whole stuffed animal is right [00:14:00] there.
If they just see the toe peeking out from under the couch, the child might not realize that that is Teddy. Mm-hmm. . Um, and that would could be a sign of. Their, um, visual information processing, which is visual perception. Mm-hmm. . So all of these things work together. There’s so many different components, and we need to make sure that all three categories are working properly, efficiently, so that our kids are functioning and keeping up with their classmates.
Yeah. I love that. I love that. Okay, so there’s three different categories, and then I wonder, so when we’re talking about visual efficiency, those have a direct influence on reading and oh my gosh, when you just explained a little bit about what visual efficiency is, it just, it’s overwhelming if you’ve never broken-down reading and what your eyes actually do, right?
There’s a lot going on. So can you break down that visual efficiency a little bit more? Sure. I mean, if we think about [00:15:00] any other body part, if we think about our, our elbow, okay, our elbow opens and closes. It also turns like we need to be able to use it in all different directions to do all different things.
Mm-hmm. , it needs to be strong and mobile. So if our eyes aren’t strong and able to move in all the different directions, it’s definitely going to impact what we’re able to. . Does that make sense? Yes, it absolutely makes sense. Yes. Yeah, so we really want to look at our children’s ocular motor skills, their ability to focus near and far, and there’s a lot of things that pop out in the classroom that mimic symptoms of other problems, particularly ADHD or dyslexia, or even sensory.
I’ve had children with vision issues where I went and I went to talk to the teacher and I said, what’s going on with, you know, Susie? And she, the teacher may say, oh, she is just a jumping bean. Definitely a sensory kid. She [00:16:00] can’t sit in her seat and I’ll look over and, you know, I always, the teachers know their kids, you know?
Mm-hmm. , they’re with them all day every day, but, , why is she jumping out of her seat? Why is she always running to sharpen her pencil instead of actually looking and doing her reading or doing her copying? And it can be because the actual act of trying to focus and have the eyes focus properly for a certain amount of time at a certain distance.
Might be painful or it might be so hard for the eye muscles to do the job that they need a break, their eyes need a break. Mm-hmm. . And so they find an excuse to get up or to move to avoid that discomfort. And I always tell parents picture, if someone were to say to you, okay. , I want you to do your normal work, but do it while you’re in the plank position for 20 minutes and you’d be like, oh my goodness.
Your belly would sink. And you’d be like, you know, falling off because it’s exhausting. You can’t do that. You don’t have the strength. Mm-hmm. to do that. Mm-hmm. . So you become [00:17:00] tired and you find another way to get it done. And it’s the same thing with our kids. Their eyes, the muscles in their eyes have to focus and refocus from near to far from the board to their paper or from left to right, from line to line. And if their eyes become so fatigued, they may, you know, show the symptoms of it, which avoiding their work, not looking, looking all around, you know, find, oh, what’s that noise? Because their eyes need that break. Yeah. And I, I remember learning how to screen for this, and within the next 12 months, , we would be sitting in team meetings and you know, special education teacher would be going over, oh, new evaluations, new evaluations.
And so it’d be like, oh yeah, this kid, you know, we’re just testing for reading some attention issues, you know, and I’d raise my hand and be like, can I screen them? And I swear I got so accurate by the end of that, just knowing those red flags of, let [00:18:00] me check them out and just kind of tell you about this and educate the parents about it.
And then not necessarily that I would pick them up for OT intervention services, but at least I was there listening for the red flags and able to screen them. Um, and so the parents could figure that out if they wanted to go through further testing and investigate that more, which is pretty awesome.
Yes. And to rule out a medical portion of it, it very often ends up being a medical issue in terms of their eyes. Mm-hmm. , and it can be treated outside, but. . We need to rule that out. We have all the information so we’re not pigeonholing this child into, oh, he’s an avoider, or, oh, she has attention problems.
You know, she hates reading. No, she would love to read, but it hurts her eyes. So she’s finding a way out of that work because it’s painful or uncomfortable.
So let’s say we identify that a child is having these kind of difficulties. Can you give us some examples of what an intervention or what an [00:19:00] accommodation might look like for this challenge in the school setting?
So the first thing I always do is I ask the parent for the eye exam report. if they had one. If they didn’t, I always suggest, please go see an eye doctor. Any eye doctor is better are the no eye doctor. But I would, I always suggest, I really want you to take them to an optometrist. So a lot of people confuse optometrist with ophthalmologists.
What is the difference, right? Ophthalmologist, this is how I always remember. , oh, it’s O P T H and I think of the H as like the health and acuity of the eye. like they can do surgery. They want to look at if the eye is healthy and if it can see an optometrist. I say opt to recommend an optometrist.
Okay. Because the optometrist is not only looking at, can their eyes see and is their eye healthy, but also now let’s look at their muscular function and are their eyes working together And is one [00:20:00] eye seeing. , you know, is one eye doing all the work and the other eye being suppressed. They’re able to tell a lot more.
They dig much deeper into the whole picture. Mm-hmm. and if the parent had already done that, I always ask for the report so that I have the information about what is going on medically. But, so OTs aren’t, we don’t do medical services and that it’s a fine line and it can be tricky because the school districts often put pressure on the service professionals, not to say anything because we don’t wanna have to pay, but it’s, it’s like, well, you know, if they had cancer, they wouldn’t expect us to pay for their chemotherapy. Mm-hmm. , you know, and that might be a silly, um, comparison, but it’s just like, if it is a medical issue, then it needs to be taken care of outside medically.
Mm-hmm. , however, , if there’s something that’s going on that’s impacting the child’s functional vision within the school setting, we absolutely can under an optometrist’s guidance and with goals written, with the parent’s [00:21:00] input and the optometrist’s input help to ease the child’s learning. Mm-hmm. , so accommodations can be, giving breaks, giving visual breaks.
So that the child is not expected to read for 20 minutes straight. Maybe they read for five and they get to go, go get a drink of water and let their eyes adjust and then come back. It could be that we need to bring the board. , whatever’s written on the board, maybe they need it on an easel five feet away.
Instead of 15 feet away. And it’s not because they don’t have good far vision, it’s because they’re focusing from far to near hasn’t gotten that good yet. . Um, even things like a reading ruler, so when the child is tracking left to. so that they’re able to stay on the one line.
Mm-hmm. , if their eyes are skipping, if they’re not able to track smoothly, then how the story that they’re reading will make no sense because the words are, would be out of order. Mm-hmm. . Sometimes they’re, see, sometimes they’re also seeing double, so now it’s really confusing [00:22:00] because the rabbit, rabbit went, went to the store and ate, ate, apple apple, you know? Mm-hmm. , it’s makes no. .
Yeah, those reading windows are my favorite thing to recommend ever. And it is so cool to give one of those kids a reading window for the first time. Or it can be a piece of paper underneath the line too. But I really like the reading windows. I do too. And they just light up if it’s something that works for them.
They’re all about it and they love it and they love picking their color cuz it’s like colored over it and it’s, it’s just amazing.
So what would an intervention be that a school OT could do in the school setting to help increase the skill level of the student? .
So of course it depends on what the child’s goals are. Yeah. And the goals must, must be academic and relate to the child’s school functioning. So very often I’ll have goals like copying from the board or reading without skipping lines, things like that. Mm-hmm. . So as an [00:23:00] intervention I absolutely can work on ocular motor skills, their ability to, look far away and look near convergence and divergence.
But I’m doing so that the end result is that functional academic progress. Mm-hmm. . So we’re not going to just do eye exercises, we’ll do a functional activity such as, um, one of the ones that my kids love is I’ll have them cut straws. and then I give them a brand-new pipe cleaner. Mm-hmm. . And I have them hold the pipe cleaner in their mouth.
And now this is tricky because it’s also working on oral motor skills. Yeah. So sometimes you have children who are super low tone and they’re not, they don’t have strong enough lip muscles to do this work. So on that case mm-hmm. , I wouldn’t do that with that kid because we’re not trying to frustrate them to death.
Yes. But, um, it’s fun for the other kids, you have them put a pipe cleaner or anything that’s a dowel, something clean, obviously. And have them put the pieces of straw onto the, whatever the stick is. [00:24:00] So they’re starting out here, they’re using proprioception because they’re holding. So now they’re incorporating knowing where my body is in space.
Mm-hmm. eye-hand coordination of getting it onto the item, and now I’m sliding it forward and now my eyes are adjusting from far away to near as I bring this straw closer to my mouth. Oh, that’s fantastic. And what a wonderful description of what we do as OTs. . Yes. In bringing like a very, what an outsider would look into our room sometimes and just be like, what are you doing
I say that all the time. Somebody will be like, you just play games all day. I, you know, I looked in there before you were playing cards and I, that’s why I have this habit. It’s probably not a very nice habit, but whenever another teacher or anybody like comments on something that I’m doing, whether it’s in the hallway or if they come into my room and say, oh, that looks so fun. I am always. Saying Yes, we’re learning how to play solitaire and we’re working on tracking from left to [00:25:00] right and categorizing by color and sequencing by number and using two hands. And he’s getting so fast now. His reading is gonna be amazing.
Like I make sure that the professional knows what I’m doing and why. Yes, it does look like I’m having fun playing cards, doesn’t it? And I am. However, there’s always a method to the madness. Yes. So that is a perfect segue because like we already mentioned, not every OT is gonna know how to screen for this.
And of course you have education to teach them how to do this, which is amazing. But if there’s a parent that’s listening to this and they’re like, that’s my kid, that is totally my kid, or I really need to have this checked out where do they go? Like where do they start?
So I think they start with the doctor. They start with an optometrist. What you want to do though, is when you call to make the appointment for your child’s up, you know, exam, you want to say, I need a full [00:26:00] vision exam. A comprehensive vision exam, including a binocular vision test. Mm-hmm. , it’s very important to use those words and to ask for a complete test. Often parents will even think, oh, I didn’t get to take them to the eye doctor this year, but the nurse checks it out. The nurse does the bare minimal of a quick peek at the child’s vision, and it’s only to see if they can see far away.
you know what I mean? That does not look at, can they see up close. It does not look at their eye functioning, their ocular motor movements. It doesn’t look at any of those other things. So that is not a good thing to rely on. You want to go to an optometrist, you want to call your insurance company and see where can you go, where it’s covered, and go from there.
Because the optometrist may say, no, it’s not a vision issue. Okay, that’s ruled out. Maybe it is attention and then you go down that road. But to be able to put a big [00:27:00] X over what may or may not be causing your child’s you know, upset and, and delays in school is really important. If the vision professional does say, okay, what I’m seeing is your child has convergence insufficiency, which means they have difficulty with the two eyes when they’re looking far away you have to do convergence and divergence. So you’re looking far away and then your eyes come in to look closer. Mm-hmm. , and they go back out to look far and in to look closer. Sometimes one eye may go faster than the other, and then your brain is like, has a, a scrambled picture that it has to try to make sense of.
Mm-hmm. in that case, once the OT has the paperwork, if the OT knows what to do, they can start working on activities like the one I mentioned with the straw or anything that works on, you know, the eye muscles and the eye moving. Mm-hmm. is going to be wonderful, but they absolutely can reach out to that optometrist and ask for [00:28:00] suggestions.
Look and say, what goals would you suggest for this child? You know, and, and go from there. If they don’t have the training. There are a lot of free videos on YouTube with, I mean, I have a bunch myself on just how to assess ocular motor function. What we’re looking for, one of the first things we’re looking at is the nine points of cardinal gaze.
So we want to see that the eyes can look straight. I always think of a tic tac toe board so the eyes can look straight. The eyes can look straight up. Then the eyes can look straight down, go back to straight. Can they look all the way to the left? Can they look all the way to the right, back to straight? Can they look Diagonal up?
Diagonal down? Sometimes you’ll see that a child can’t go a certain way mm-hmm. or that their eyes can’t go as far. Maybe they can look all the way to the left, but when they get to the right, it’s like just a little bit and you’re, hmm. What’s going on there? And it all begins to make. . Yeah. And it’s just, you know, okay, so we need to exercise that [00:29:00] muscle just like we would exercise the elbow or the arm or the fingers.
Mm-hmm. . Now we need to exercise that. So again, there are a lot of suggestions and activities and things on Pinterest and on YouTube on my own website as well. Um, but you can also , look in your OT textbooks, you know, go old school if you want. There are online trainings like mine, vision 1 0 1 that I do with Robert Constantine is a I think it’s a great vision one, oh, you know, training.
However, there are others available out there too. So if they want that training, the parent can say, you know, do you feel comfortable working on this? And if not, would you go for the training? Mm-hmm. . And they can even ask the special ed director. Mm-hmm. A parent, can you ask, OT may not want to ask or feel funny asking, but the parent can say, hi, I’m Mrs.
Smith and I know that my son needs a little bit of extra help when it comes to ocular motor skills, but my school OT has told me that she has never had a training on that. Can you send her. And yes, you can send [00:30:00] her tomorrow because it’s online now,that’s the one thing about technology, and yes, there are so many resources out there that are available to everyone, so,
yes. And I will say too, like I’ve had some reports from ophthalmologists that. Give wonderful suggestions for accommodations. It’s like, right, okay. I might not know every little jargon thing that they mention in the report. Right. I can get the gist of it, you know? Yes. But their accommodations are wonderful and oftentimes they’re even accessible to like the teacher to know what he’s talking about when he mm-hmm.
while I say he, but it can be a she as well. . Right. And so it’s just so much easier to know like, oh, okay, that’s what this means. This is what I should do to help them. And it’s a pretty easy thing to hand over, um, to your school i e p team as well. Yeah. And I think it’s, I think it’s just that education piece of everyone being aware.
Oh, okay. So he has difficulty near and far. You can say to the parent, do you know how you can help? Please go play catch every night. Mm-hmm. with Johnny. Mm-hmm. . And they’re like, [00:31:00] really? That’s it? Yes. , you know, um, take your checkerboard and put Velcro on it and play on a vertical surface because now, going from near to far.
I mean, there’s so many fun ways. I had one little boy and, and the mom was like, I, I’m just not sure how to help him. So I said, if you are comfortable with it and you write me a letter saying you’re comfortable with it, I will make videos of what we’re doing in ot. Mm-hmm. , and I’ll put it on a private YouTube channel between you and I and you can see what he’s doing and how he’s doing it with me and copy.
And so that was how we worked it out. It was almost like a home exercise program. That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s amazing. So this is a question that I didn’t plan to ask you. So, okay. I, I didn’t give you a heads up about it, but I just wanna touch really briefly on, some people will go to the ophthalmologist or to a different provider, get diagnosed, and then they’ll be referred for vision therapy.
And vision therapy is generally out of pocket, not covered by insurance [00:32:00] OTs, especially outpatient OTs. I know we’re talking about schools here, but I feel like this is important on this topic, right? Um, you can seek out an occupational therapy in the outpatient setting who kind of specializes in this area?
do you wanna talk a little bit about maybe the differences between vision therapy and what we do as OTs? Or do you wanna give any parents any tips or advice on if they get referred to vision therapy? Like what would you say about it? So there’s, there’s some different schools of thought. , like we talked about before, ophthalmologists and optometrists have very different trainings, and in general, of course, we never wanna pigeonhole anybody.
Mm-hmm. in general, ophthalmologists will say vision therapy is hokey pokey. It’s not, you know, it’s b ba, it’s nothing. Optometrists will say, , it works. Mm-hmm. . We’ll have parents who [00:33:00] say, my child had vision therapy and oh my goodness, what an amazing difference in their life. Yes. And then you’ll have parents that will say, my child had vision therapy and it didn’t make a difference, and it cost me a fortune.
Yes. So you, you, you just can’t, it’s not black and white because the child whose parents said it didn’t help. Okay. We wanna know, did they do their home exercises every single day? Did they end up having a d h d? Was it that? as well. Sometimes we have a poor kid who has these ocular motor issues as well as ADHD.
Mm-hmm. , or they’re on the spectrum, you know, there’s no magic potion, but if it becomes an issue, and I have girlfriends who have come to me and say, what do I do? It’s a fortune I, my insurance won’t cover it. What do I do? And I will say, you can ask your optometrist for home exercise program. Mm-hmm. , and that will be a much different level of treatment.
Always ask, how long do you expect this [00:34:00] to last? Mm-hmm. generally they’ll say six to 12 weeks, and then we reassess. So maybe they’ll be measuring the child’s, um, ocular motility movement and speed and things like that. And at six weeks they see some nice. , then they may want to do another six weeks because it’s working, everything’s going well.
If they’re not seeing any progress, they can either say, you know, it’s not working, or they can say, let’s work on a different aspect of mm-hmm. , what’s going on. So there’s just no black and white about it. It does the whole vision therapy. Um, dilemma reminds me very much of how sensory processing used to be treated.
Yes, yes. in the past, I, so I’ve been in OT for 22 years. When I first was in ot, people like some of the older psychologists and the ABA therapists back then would, would very much dismiss occupational therapy and sensory [00:35:00] processing. And I remember this one man, I was saying, well, you know, he’s, he is, wants to swing because he, he needs, he, he needs that vestibular input.
And the man like, cut me off. And he said he wants to swing because it feels. I was. , it feels good because his body needs the rhythmic vestibular input, Mr. You know, , but there wasn’t enough research. Mm-hmm. , because it’s such a hard thing to research every single child on the spectrum, and every single child with sensory processing disorder is different.
So it took so much work and so much resource to gather all those case studies and all that information to prove that sensory processing dysfunction is a thing to get it into the dsm. You know what I mean? Yeah. Now we are in that boat where the vision therapist and the optometrists are working very hard, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with Mitchell Scheinman, OD, FCOVD, FAAO.
So he in particular has done a very large [00:36:00] number of research to, to support the fact that it does work. It is real. Mm-hmm. . Um, I, I read a statistic the other day that there was a study done. Ugh, what was it? There was a study done. A large number of children with learning disabilities. I’m, I’m blanking on the number, but they found that 96% of these students with learning disabilities had some kind of eye movement disorder, 96%.
Wow. So, okay, we need to get on board here. Mm-hmm. , we need to stop ignoring this piece. Like we used to ignore sensory and now all of a sudden everybody’s involved in sensory and the Yeah. The social workers are helping with sensory and the teachers have sensory boxes in their classrooms and it used to be like poo-pooed, like, oh, that’s not a thing.
That’s not a real thing. You know, vision is, is coming around the corner. Mm-hmm. and especially, The parents who are such big advocates for the [00:37:00] dyslexic children. Mm-hmm. , yes. It really, you know, vision is a huge component of reading and of learning and of retaining the information. So, It’s, I feel that it is around the corner that it will be completely respected.
I think it’s 50 50 right now. Mm-hmm. . There are people who are like, oh, it’s hocus pocus. But there’s a lot of research now, a lot of journal articles, you know, real substantial research about it, working about the exercises, working, and, um, I’m a. Yeah, that’s, that’s amazing context. Oh my gosh. What a, what an amazing context for parents to know, too.
Um, so I just wanna thank you for coming on. I You’re welcome. Love your expertise. I love talking with you. Um, but I’m wondering if you want to just tell us about your business. Tell us where parents can find resources. If there’s therapists or administrators looking for resources.
Where do they go to connect with you? Sure. My website is miss Jaime ot.com. It’s j A [00:38:00] I M e and I do have a lot of resources on my website in regards to vision. I also have my vision course, which is for school-based OTs. It’s not for parents, and it’s to train them in how to assess and treat vision. It’s an introductory course.
To train them on vision dysfunction, and it is an A O T A approved a course if they, if we release that course twice a year in February and. So it’s coming up again soon.
As far as parents, there’s a lot of information on my website, so Miss Jaime ot.com. Um, there’s information about comparing vision deficits to A D H D, learning disorders and vision, the eye exam that your child really needs, and they can just go into the search bar and look up the vision
stuff. There’s a lot of information on there. I’ve got a lot of free handouts as well for teachers and for OTs. Mm-hmm. , I have an eye exam. Panned out reminder. And I, I really love it. And you can be like, oh yeah, we, my school gives that, no, no, this one’s really, really good. Because it says the [00:39:00] exact words that the parent needs to say, a binocular vision exam.
I want a full binocular vision exam, including a dilation. If they don’t say that, there’s no guarantee that the child is not just being checked for glasses quickly. Mm-hmm. Yeah. We don’t want that. I mean, we do want that. And that’s better than nothing. We want a little more, something more in depth if there’s, to really rule out if there’s something going on for that kiddo.
So the handout for that is missJaimeot.com/eyereminder, and you can download that form and I download it at the beginning of the year. I give it to all my students in their OT notebook, and then I give it to my teachers that I work with and I ask them to please give it out to their whole class because our kids need to have their eyes checked no matter what.
Mm-hmm. so. . Often parents are busy and they, you know, are over the summer and then all of a sudden school’s here and the child is struggling and we’re not sure why. Mm-hmm. , let’s get the eyes checked out. Let’s check it off. It’s done. But it’s not just about needing glasses. There’s a lot more [00:40:00] to vision than just needing glasses.
Yes. If you have one takeaway from this whole thing, you now know that there’s much more to vision. Yes. Oh my goodness. Okay. So I will link up all of the links in the show notes.
And I just wanna thank you so much for coming on to celebrate our hundredth, episode. I’m so excited to be the 100th episode. It’s a, it’s a. Monumental. Yes. Yes. Very special. So thank you so much for your time. I so appreciate you. You’re very welcome.
Welcome. I appreciate you inviting me. I hope we have spread a lot of good information out there for the parents and teachers and therapists that are listening. Agreed.
Isn’t she just amazing and so knowledgeable. And I’m wondering if you are thinking at the end of this episode. Hm. I should really get that checked out. So I really, really hope that you do. It could be one major key that we’re missing to help you help your child learn better. So just a reminder that all of miss Jaime’s links
are listed in the show notes. And you can find the show notes at VIP lab.com/episode 101 0. [00:41:00] Zero or the link to the show notes is below this episode in your podcast player. And a super, super special thank you to her for coming on the show for our special hundredth episode. And thank you for listening, sharing rating and reviewing podcasts. And of course, joining me in the parent IEP advocacy summit and the ultimate parent IEP prep course. I love getting to know you guys through those online courses and events, and I’m just, I’m so excited to be able to support you.
In 2023, we do have some fun plans for 2023, including launching a very, very affordable membership for you to have community and connect with other parents that are going through this similar frustrations of advocating for your kid. Also have some resources to work through some emotions that .
May come up when you’re trying to advocate for your kid and of course, gain technical IEP knowledge and get all of your questions answered in a really nice hub and community. So be on the lookout in your email, if you are [00:42:00] on the email list for that in the next month or two. And if you aren’t on the email list, you can sign up by just grabbing one of my freebies on my website, the parent IEP role cheat sheet, and the IEP process step-by-step guide are both available on the website at www dot B.
IEP lab.com and I’ve linked them below this episode in your podcast player as well. So thank you again from the bottom of my heart for all of your support. And I cannot wait to see what the next a hundred episodes of the parent IEP lab brings. Thank you so much. And we’ll see you. Same time, same place next week. Thanks.