image046Students who suffer from insufficient Visual Discrimination Skills will struggle with reading fluency and speed, and therefore, reading comprehension as well. Those with insufficient Visual Discrimination Skills will often exhibit the following symptoms when reading: trouble with left-to-right directionality, reversing letters and/or the order of letters in a word, omitting words (especially smaller ones), substituting one word for another, adding words that are not in the text, failing to pause at punctuation marks, frequent rereading of a sentence or part of a sentence, eyes that often revert backwards across a line of text then forwards again, frequent loss of place, choppy and/or slow reading that is below grade level, and skipping lines of text. Learning Tower offers tutoring services to remediate Visual Discrimination Skills through a series of symbol tracking, letter tracking, sentence tracking, and sentence tracking with high frequency words exercises as well as activities that remediate visual and context cues skills in order to aid in successful reading comprehension from Ann Arbor Publishers. If you notice that several or more of these symptoms accompany your child’s on-level reading on a rather regular basis after he/she has completed first grade, please contact Learning Tower for a Visual Discrimination Assessment to determine if further remediation on such skills is necessary.