You won’t believe your eyes…and ears!

Sound and vision

Although my son passed his infants vision screening, the truth is he has not been using his eyes correctly for years. He has always had particularly poor hand-eye coordination, difficulty with handwriting and was terrible at catching a ball.

It is the difference between seeing and aiming: you may have 20:20 vison, but can you hit the target or the bullseye every time? The same is true for hearing and listening. An audiologist may give the all-clear: hearing is above the thresholds for all frequencies in both ears, but what is listening like in background noise? Or maybe ears are over-sensitive to sounds?

When my son completed his first round of Tomatis® sound and listening therapy (aged 8 years), his motor skills improved greatly. He went from being unable to throw a ball overarm, to bowling and batting cricket balls better than his older brother (it was summertime and all about the cricket). Not only that but his balance, posture and control improved, he had more stamina for writing and his handwriting started to flow. The sound stimulation had freed up his body and made him more relaxed.

His handwriting has really started to flow which means he wants to write.

During his second round of Tomatis® last month he picked up the art bug. He had been given an A3 pad of plain paper and was happy creating colourful pictures using felt tips and pastels. A lot of the time this was his activity of choice during the listening sessions.

Here are two entries from his listening log:

Sun 3/10/2021 Started a new school workbook. Making paper planes (cutting, folding, sticking). Drawing and colouring – lots of pictures and happy to do the listening. “In the past I would have given up” he said about making things that are tricky.

Thur 7/10/2021 Pastels. Did some poster sized pictures and made a ‘Writing In Progress’ poster using fancy handwriting. Had a go at using transfers and was amazed by the process. Ended up tracing Manga faces.

October 2021

Here is the pastels picture he drew that day (exactly one month ago in October).

It takes a few weeks for the brain to integrate the effects of the listening therapy. During this time, new interests emerge and previous skills are refined. For my son, this has been discovering a passion for drawing that I have never seen before. He is an extremely creative soul and has always been able to describe ideas, but never put the vision or details on to paper.

In the past few days, he has completed over 30 drawings (the evidence is piling up around the house). Two elements really stand out for me:

  1. He does not start, then stop, then start again. He does his drawings in one go without mistakes, or just adapts to errors.

  2. All his drawings have the same proportions, which considering they are all freehand onto blank paper, is really amazing for him.

November 2021. All his drawings have the same proportions and he is making use of the space on the page. He is ‘seeing the whole picture’.

Tomatis® sound and listening therapy improves motor control and self-expression, gently easing the 'blocks' to learning.

Tomatis® sound and listening therapy agitates the inner ear to accelerate global progress. It leads to conscious physical control of the body. This may reveal itself as improved gross motor skills, refined fine motor skills or even the ability to express oneself without physical blocks.

You really won’t believe your eyes…and ears!

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Back to school. Back to reality.