How to screen for Convergence Insuffciency

You can test for convergence insufficiency using a pen or small toy. Sit directly in front of your child, and have him/her look at your nose, then at the pen/toy (held at 10cm from their nose), and watch their eyes for equal convergence (turning the eyes in). If the pen/toy is aligned with the centre of their nose, both eyes should be turned in by the same amount. Do a few jumps between your nose and the pen/toy, having the child hold the nearer focus for a few seconds each time.

• You are looking for the child to focus steadily on the pen/toy, with both eyes remaining still.
• Watch for one eye not looking at the pen / both eyes looking then drifting outwards / switching focus between the eyes.

This is testing how well your child can make the eye movements of board-to-book, which is done repeatedly at school, and also how well they can hold their focus on a close task, for example, reading.

Once you have established whether or not the child can hold this convergence, then ask them an age appropriate question and prompt them to keep looking at the pen/toy. Whatever the question is, it must make them THINK – this is testing whether the student is able to hold their eye coordination while thinking and doing something new; an inability to hold convergence while thinking affects a child’s concentration and comprehension while reading/writing. If you see one or both eyes wandering, ask the child to ‘look at the pen’ or ‘use both eyes’ – even from an early age, children know exactly what this means. Repeat this test a few times to gauge their ability.

If you have any questions, please contact us on 3210 1822, or click here to send our optometrists your questions.

Ball catching for vision and learning

One of the common exercises we suggest to parents who have children with learning difficulties is to begin ball catching with the child. The reason for this is simple and also practical. Firstly, a lot of children who have learning difficulties do so because they have poor depth perception due to poor eye muscle control.

This causes the child to have difficulty judging how far away something is from him or her – the child is unable to keep their eyes on the page as he/she is not sure where to look.
Our goal is to teach the child how to adequately control the eyes and then re-establish his or her confidence in where the eyes are looking. So how does ball catching help? Ball catching is a very spatial exercise that requires judging exactly how far away something is, that is moving towards you. Teaching a child to catch a ball in front of the body teaches the child to be confident about his or her vision at a similar distance to where they hold a book.

So watch your child, if he or she waits for the ball to hit their body before actually catching the ball then this is an important exercise. Begin with a large ball and gradually decrease the size and distance making sure your child catches it in front of the body.
Some schools have instigated ball catching as a daily exercise for all children from Prep to Grade 3 as it works specifically on coordinating eyes and hands at the reading/writing distance.