Dyslexia Gold
Based on the latest neuroscience research:
-
Engaging Eyes - improves convergence and eye tracking
-
Fluency Builder - improves phonological awareness and fluency
This video shows a child with eye tracking problems trying to read. The red line shows where she was looking when she was reading, and demonstrates why she finds reading so hard.
Engaging Eyes
Research has found that 98% of struggling readers have a vision problem. They have difficulty sustaining convergence, which is crucial for reading.
Fluent readers look at around 150 points per minute when reading. However people with dyslexia usually make excessive eye movements. They tend to look at around 1,000 points per minute, with around half of these being in the wrong place.
So most of their processing is taken up with interpreting what they've seen, rather than understanding what they've read.
On each point your child needs to reconverge your eyes (focus both eyes on the same point). If they can't converge their eyes their brain will receive two different images, e.g the left eye focuses on the first letter and the right eye focuses on the last letter in the word.
Engaging Eyes improves: convergence and erratic eye movements. These are the cause of many reading problems associated with dyslexia including letter reversal, skipping lines or words, problems understanding what was read, and moving or blurry text.
Fluency Builder
MRI scans found differences in the brain between people with and without dyslexia.
Reading is done in the brain. But which parts? MRI scans show that dyslexic people use different parts of the brain to read than non-dyslexic people do.
Numerous scientific studies have proven brain plasticity – that the brain can be changed by practising and repeating tasks.
Scientific studies into children with dyslexia have proven that repeating activities that activate the part of the brain that non-dyslexics use when reading, changes their brain so that they read more like a non-dyslexic person does.
When we learn to read we start by sounding out every letter. This is done by the left parietotemporal system. But once we are fluent we just look at a word and read it instantly, without decoding it. This is done by the left occipitotemporal area.
MRI scans have shown that children with dyslexia tend to mostly use Broca's area when reading. That is why even when they learn to read their reading is still harder and slower than it should be.
Studies done by Shaywitz et al. (2002) have shown that after a phonological deficit intervention dyslexic children showed increased activation in left hemisphere regions, and their brain scans start to look more like people without dyslexia. They read more fluently and their comprehension improves.
Fluency Builder improves: fluency, comprehension, phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming, phoneme manipulation, segmenting, auditory discrimination and morpheme mapping.