How I can help
Reading & learning difficulties
Occupational therapy does not teach reading, but it looks at the abilities that make learning possible: visual processing, attention, organisation, endurance and a sense of capability.
What you might notice
- Learning to read is unusually slow or frustrating
- Skipping lines, losing place in the text
- Tiring very quickly in front of written text
- Avoiding reading even when the content is interesting
- Your child understands beautifully out loud, but struggles on paper
Why this might be happening
Reading also relies on visual and motor abilities: eye tracking, discriminating similar shapes and scanning a line in an orderly way.
It relies on attention and endurance — text requires sustained effort.
Sometimes the difficulty is not reading itself but the overall load of the task, and changing how work is presented changes the picture.
What skills are involved
Visual processing
Discrimination, visual memory and organised scanning.
Attention and endurance
Staying with a task without losing the thread.
Learning organisation
How a task is approached and kept in order.
Sense of capability
A child who fears failing stops trying — and that directly affects learning.
How occupational therapy can help
- Examining the functional components that affect learning
- Practical strategies for reading and working with text
- Environmental adaptations at home and in class
- Referral to other professionals where appropriate, including speech-language therapy or educational assessment
What Shira might assess
- Visual processing and line tracking
- Attention, work pace and endurance
- Organisational strategies within a task
- How your child copes with difficulty
When it's worth speaking to someone
- When there is a striking gap between verbal ability and reading or writing
- When learning is taking a significant emotional toll
- When it is unclear whether the issue is reading, attention, language or something else
Worth saying
A single sign doesn't mean a child needs therapy. Children develop at different rates, and often this is entirely ordinary variation. The point of a conversation is to understand the picture, not to find a problem.
Not sure exactly what your child needs? You can start with a conversation.
You don't need to diagnose the difficulty yourself. You can simply describe what you're seeing, and we'll start from a shared understanding of whether an occupational therapy assessment or treatment is appropriate.