I realised that when a baby makes its first movement it has to learn the ability to fixate a moving object and move its eyes. As a “Dyspraxic” child is unbalanced and it’s body is moving around constantly they are not able to train their eyes. I saw this in an inability to be able to judge distance, spatial, read, write and especially take in information around us. A school nurse checks for focus along a corridor not for fields, fixation, fusion and flexibility. This child has regular light therapy (watching a moving light in darkness, to strengthen the eyes) and is now using joined-up writing with the best hand writing you have ever seen. He is still finding reading and spelling difficult but this is due to years of missed teaching and the need to catch up. His little brother came to us in Nursery and because we were prepared as soon as he started showing difficulties we put him on the programme and had light therapy for only a few months, we caught him in time. By 5 years old he was back on track and he was back in class.
When I asked our school nurse about tracking and explained this necessary skill she commented that “this would have to be done by a professional and we are not trained” I have 130 children who were all passed by a school nurse as having perfect focus but could not track. This was affecting their learning, following the programme all except 3 children (who went and had light vision therapy) learnt to track. I am not highly qualified in optometry but using a bean bag and looking at writing I could see a problem. The main thing is that all these children are no longer struggling.