A victory for the kid who can't see so well

M has eye problems. He was diagnosed at 3 with strabismus. It was temporarily "cured" with glasses. When he was 4, the diagnosis was strabismus (accommodative esotropia), 4th nerve palsy and astigmatism in both eyes. Oh yeah, and he's far-sighted. By that time his vision in his turning eye had gone to 20/100. We patched for several months...8 to 10 hours each day.
It hard to teach letters to a kid with one eye...with 20/30 vision. Then there was the first surgery and the time without glasses to help his eye muscles learn to work again. And then the second surgery and more time without glasses.

It's been a year since his last surgery. His vision is currently 20/30 and he is still out of glasses until we get those eyes aligned as well as possible. We're close.

During this whole eye ordeal, reading instruction has been not been as dedicated as it would for a child with no vision problems. Plus his speech problems cause some difficulty in decoding. His ophthalmologist has viewed our homeschooling as a positive thing. We've been able to focus on his eye health instead of school grades. A school kid would have been back in glasses way before now and wouldn't get the chance to let his eyes align naturally. For us, vision and ultimately binocular vision is most important. The school stuff can wait.

The fact that the kid doesn't enjoy reading (and you wouldn't either if you had to close one eye and cock your head to see things. And if your eyes jumped enough to make you lose your place on the line with every few words.) doesn't help either.

But tonight I pulled out a copy of "My Father's Dragon" and he read the first chapter for me with very few problems thanks to bright lighting and a blue highlighter line to help him stay on the correct line. He's even over that "race right over the periods but stop sentences at the end of the line" thing that drives me crazy about little kid oral reading. He was able to understand what he was reading and didn't have to focus all his attention on decoding.

First chapter book. One chapter down...nine more to go.