Joel (age 7) has just finished OT (occupational therapy) for the next little while. After 5 months working to improve his visual sequential memory, he has moved from the 4th percentile to the 53rd for visual sequential memory tasks. Yay for average skills! Joel now has one strategy he can use to remember visual patterns - verbal rehearsal. This is one more strategy than he had at easter.
In case you were wondering, visual sequential memory issues make school life not so much fun. Reading is difficult because you look at a word and half a second later forget which order the letters went in. So you are constantly reading words back to front and inside out. Copying from the black board is near impossible because you have to keep moving your eyes up and down and can't keep track of what letter you are up to. And spelling is a nightmare because you have no intuitive feel for what words should look like.
But thanks to the skills of our friendly OT, we're getting through. Joel's visual memory will probably never be good, but we've started to teach him coping strategies so that he can keep up in school. We are blessed to have so many professionals to help our kids with their struggles. It seems that my dad had similar issues to Joel (it's nice to have bad genes to blame!) All that his teachers could suggest was that he get his eyes checked.
Hi Simone, just came by on a return visit!
ReplyDelete53rd percentile?!? That's the sort of progress we therapists remember and is the highlight of our weeks because it hardly EVER happens. Well done Joel and well done Mum. Go out for an ice cream (for Joel) and some carrot sticks!
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