Sewing A Dress

This is a delayed Halloween note (a month late). Child #2 wanted to be Mary, the Mother of Jesus, for Halloween. Rather than do the smart thing (like my neighbor) and jimmie up an easy “make do” costume or pay $6 + shipping for a dress and drape a small white sheet around her, I picked up some blue & white fabric and some sewing patterns.

For the record, I am a pretty good hand sewer – in terms of patching things mostly. The last time I sewed something from a pattern with a machine was a pillow in seventh or eighth grade Home Ec class. For over a week, for a couple of hours each night, I worked on a dress and a cape. Here is a picture of the dress – finished but not yet “cleaned up” of all my marks and stray thread:

I designed it so the dress would fit my oldest when Halloween was over. The questions was, would we want it seen by the light of day?

My husband’s response when he saw it, “It turned out very different than I thought it would.” I chuckled in response and he wondered aloud if I had taken his comment the wrong way.

Indeed not! I knew exactly what he meant. He was expecting a shapeless shift with perhaps a rope for a waist tie. That is not what I showed him as a finished produce. The finished product has plenty of war wounds and “learning opportunities” and it won’t stand serious scrutiny. But, it wasn’t bad for a first try. My husband said I can make “all the dresses” for the girls. NO THANKS!

. . . But, maybe I’ll attempt a First Communion Dress. You never know.

Vision Therapy Evaluation – Our Plan

Based on the test results we were given, their interpretation, and plan of action, we do not see an overriding reason to pursue Vision Therapy at this time.

To go back to our reasons for looking into Vision Therapy:
 - Reading Issues – Not wanting to read anymore, comprehension going down, etc.
 - Writing Problems – Pencil phobia, fine motor skills – coloring out of the lines, bad manuscript handwriting — can we remove barriers to make school easier / less of a struggle?
 - Sports - Less coordinated than peers
 - See if there were eye-related issues that could be helped

Their results showed deficiencies in the following areas:
 - Eye Tracking & speed of focus
 - Fine motor (hand-eye coordination)
 - Gross motor as it pertains to bilateral movement
 - Visualization & visual memory as it relates to “sight words”, normal or above averages with shapes)
 - Directional confusion in terms of automatic & accurate self-awareness of laterality and directionality.

Their proposed plan deals with eye focusing and tracking, development of directional concepts, visual recognition and memory, body awareness and control, and improving fine motor skills. They indicated that for “no additional cost or time,” they could roll-in the areas they felt our child was not “up to her potential” in and make her a “superstar.” (Something some parents would be thrilled to hear, I assume. We are not looking for a superstar.)

These look like good matches, don’t they? So why not move forward with it?
 - If we did go ahead, we would ask for the “visual recognition” part to be removed from the proposed plan. I do not want to work at cross-purposes with my daily phonics work. While the actual therapist said it would not be anti-phonics, the doctor said what they planned on doing would “REMOVE” her phonics and “REPLACE” it with “whole word” approaches.

 - The body awareness/directionality do not worry us overmuch. We will plan games and work on this as part of our homeschool plan.

 - Fine motor – I realized as I was talking to the actual therapist (after meeting with the doctor) that much of their prescription will be “practice.” In the case of Fine Motor skills, it is not an eye issue (as shown by the visual score being slightly above average) – it is a “motor” problem. The “integration between eye and body” tested in the normal range, although low. Her “pencil phobia” will not be improved with more writing. That will only fatigue her and frustrate her. However, their results did show I need to spend some more time correcting inappropriate habits she has developed in what she does write. Her cursive is already showing improvements over her manuscript.

 - Gross motor / bilateral integration: This area is beyond my skills to address, but could be worked on with physical therapy which we will look into separately.

 - Eye tracking and focusing – This is the one area I am most concerned with. Several parents with children who have issues like my daughter have impressed on me the benefits of vision therapy. We plan on waiting for a couple more years and looking back into VT with another provider then to address this key area.

Vision Therapy Evaluation – Other Results

In this post, I will outline other tests performed at my child’s Vision Therapy evaluations and their suggested plan.

The Gardner Test of Visual Perceptual Skills (TVPS) were administered. There were memory and non-motor subtests – seven in all. On average, my child scored just above average (60%), but had two scores that stood out. “Visual Form Constancy” measures the child’s ability to turn a shape mentally and identify a figure that represents the rotate shape. On this test, my child scored at the lowest end of “normal.” (Would this tie into the left/right tests results when she was unable to mentally project left/right onto another or mentally “turn” ideas of left/right as instructed?)

In contrast, she scored at the top end of the chart (99%) on “Visual Spatial Relationships.” This is an important skill for an engineer and if you are good at jigsaw puzzles, you may test well on this subtest. With two engineers for parents and knowing we do a LOT of jigsaw puzzles at our house, this was not surprising.

What was surprising was that the VT people focused in on the one high score in this battery of TVPS. They surmised that because of that one off-the-chart skill, my child’s potential is likely not being realized “in the other areas.” Does that make sense to anyone else? It wasn’t like two or three of the scores were high. Only one of the several was outside the “normal” range, yet they indicated that they thought she could be brought up to that extremely high level in the other areas. It seemed a bit of a leap. Besides, we aren’t looking for a “superstar” (word they used!), we just wanted to see if we could smooth out the bumps in the road, if there were any.

A Phonological Awareness Skills Program (PASP) test was administered and it showed her “test age equivalent” of 1-4 years high than her age.

The Birch-Belont Auditory-Visual Integration test was administered which probes the child’s ability to match what she hears with what she sees. This was pointed out to be an important skill for phonics and music reading. I do not know how to interpret the raw results, but their write-up says my child performed at an “age-expected level.”

Wold Sentence Copy- In terms of raw results, this test showed 12 letters per minute and 1 letter per glance. She was marked “inadequate” for letter formation, word spacing, pencil grip, inconsistent working distance (6-16″) and variable paper support. They noted that she sub-vocalizes as she writes (whispering or lips moving) and that her “visual-motor performance is demanding and inefficient” and that she performance at a “level that is significantly below age appropriate norms for speed of letter writing.”

Their Plan
They prescribed a plan to “develop the necessary visual abilities of academic achievement” that emphasize:
- monocular activities designed to equalized the focusing, tracking, and pointing of each eye
- Visual-spacial tasks to develop integrated sequential and directional concepts
- visualization program that improves the speed and span of visual recognition as they pertain to short & long-term visual memory
- Visuo-motor tasks to improve body awareness and control, and visually directed fine motor skills.

They believe it will take 6-12 months of in-office optometric visual therapy to rehabilitate her vision, based on an assumption of five days per week home practice and regular attendance at weekly in-office therapy. The six months is the minimum commitment – lump sum paid in advance.