Exercise Your Eyes

Crazy as it sounds, exercising your eyes can greatly improve your eyesight. Help your children to develop all the functions their eyes can do.

Remember when we were told, don?t cross your eyes; they?ll stick like that? Well it turns out parents weren?t giving the best advice. Did your eyes stick? Of course not. My eye Doctor can make his eyes do the craziest things, looking every direction. This has given him very strong eye muscles. So start your children young, and they can have strong eye muscles too.

It may not be too late for you, the teacher, either. Lots of people have improved their eyesight before you, so give it a try, and teach by example.

What to Do

1) Practice focussing on different distances. Throughout the day, many of us talk with people who are close to us, look at a book or computer screen, and other nearby sights. Teach your children to take an eye break ? often ? in their day from things that are near. As you?re driving, see who can read signs ahead first. Draw attention to the distant purple mountain. Stop and see who can see the bird high up on the branch of a tree - what colour is it? Do you see the nest? Even if there is no nest, it will be fun trying to find it!

2) While exercising your eyes, look as far to the left as you can, then look up as far as you can, then as far right as possible, and then down. After you?ve done this circle a few times, change direction.

3) Take your finger, or another object, and put it in front of your nose. See if you can get both of your eyes to come together in the middle. (You?ll need to have someone help you to tell you if you did it.)

4) Put two fingers in front of your face. Move them farther and farther apart. Try to keep your eyes on both moving fingers at the same time. See if you can get both eyes to move to the outside edge. For fun, measure the distance you could see both objects at the same time. With practice your peripheral vision ability may increase. Greater peripheral vision could help you when your playing sports, or see an animal coming out of woods and heading for the road.

5) Protect eyes during your science experiments and building projects. Before you start each activity, do a quick check. What part of the body could get hurt during this? If liquids or other things might fly into the eyes, wear protective eyewear.

6) When using a microscope for your science experiments, keep both eyes open, not the just eye looking through. I know, it?s not easy, so practice!

7) Check with your eye doctor if you have any concerns that your child may not be seeing as well as they should. Ask them if they know of any exercises, or aids, you could use to strengthen their eyes. For example, there are pictures made up of dots of different colours. One colour of dots makes up a picture inside the dots of another colour. If someone can?t distinguish the different colours, they can?t see the picture, and it may indicate colour blindness.

8) Play hide and seek games with pictures and in real life. This can develop not only your eyes, but thinking ability as well. There is a series of books that we?ve enjoyed, where you have to find objects in a big picture. They?re fun, and great to play when you have company come over.

Are My Child's Eyes OK?

As parents, there are a lot of things we're monitoring in our children's health, so remember to have your child's eyes checked regularly by your eye doctor, especially when you have special concerns.

The Austin Eye Gym, in Austin, Texas, USA, has developed an informative website. It includes a vision quiz along with checklists to help parents determine what might be normal and what might indicate a problem.

While my family and I haven't used the complete Austin Eye Gym methods in caring for eye health, it seems from their success story section that numerous children have benefited, so I wanted to pass the information along to you in case your family is searching for more information. Some of the specific challenges addressed include: ADD/ADHD, autism and dyslexia, brain injuries and trouble learning in school.

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