School Begins for Fall 2016 Very Soon!!

The new school year is right around the corner...less than a month away!!  Have you scheduled that appointment for your child's comprehensive eye exam?  Drs. Hansen, Pietig, and Young encourage you to schedule an eye health exam for your child each year to ensure good vision for their educational needs!!  Struggling with reading and other school work may indicate a vision problem.  Your child's eyes are used constantly at work and at play.

The "basic skills" of vision are needed to see and learn well.  They include:

• Near vision - used to read books and papers and see the computer clearly
• Distance vision - used to see the board and projector information clearly
• Eye teaming - used as their eyes move together as a team
• Eye movement skills - used to move and aim their eyes back and forth across the page and shift from one object to another quickly
• Focusing skills - used to move the eye from near to far and back again keeping vision clear - required for copying or notetaking
• Eye hand coordination - used for writing, drawing, jumping, etc as eyes and hands work together

1 in 4 children may experience vision problems, and they may not even realize the way they see is not normal!  80% of all learning up to age 12 comes through vision!

There are screenings each year in school to hopefully uncover some of these problems, but vision and eye health is more than being able to see 20/20 on an eye chart! The doctors at Ankeny Family Vision Center take children's vision and eye health very seriously.  It is recommended that part of your back to school preparations be a comprehensive, individualized eye health exam. During this exam, your child's health and vision history will be reviewed along with visual acuity.  A refractive error may be determined and assessed, and the doctors and techs will also test for those "basic skills" listed above.

At Ankeny Family Vision Center, Drs. Hansen, Pietig and Young, and our staff, strive to give all our patients from infants on "the personal vision care you deserve"!!  Schedule that back to school appointment today and ensure that good vision and eye health needed for those long school days!!!

(information taken from an article on the Iowa Optometric Association web page)

3D Vision and Eye Health

Did you know that the ability to perceive depth in a 3D presentation can be a test of vision health indicators and is more sensitive than the standard eye chart that has been used for many years?  3D viewing requires that both eyes work together in a coordinated fashion, as they converge, focus and track the 3D images!  For the 1 in 4 children who have undetected vision issues, 3D viewing can help identify and even treat these undetected problems.  These problems respond well to treatments through a comprehensive, individualized eye health exam.  And as an added benefit, these treatments will actually help the child in other areas of reading and learning tasks!

Binocular vision is the ability to align and focus both eyes on an object and then combine the visual images from each eye to a single, clear three dimensional perception.  Difficulty seeing in 3D can arise when eye fatigue occurs, forcing the eyes to make adjustments to focus eyes simultaneously on images that are near and far away.

There have been studies in Europe on the benefit of using 3D enabled learning tools in the classroom.  The studies have shown that children are able to concentrate more with 3D.

3D has definitely added a new dimension in vision.  It will be interesting to see the ways 3D will become a tool used in the classroom here in the United States.

In the meantime, enjoy the 3D movies.  If you experience any headaches, nausea, blurred vision, or dizziness, that could indicate a potential vision problem, call Ankeny Family Vision Center and see one of our doctors to help you determine if the ability to perceive depth in 3D could be the problem.

(Information taken from American Optometric Association)