Comments
I attended
your BAVX training in Gunnison, CO this past summer and
loved it. I was so excited to incorporate it into my resource
classes this year. I have already noticed progress in my students
which I believe is at least partially due to Bal-A-Vis-X. I want to
mention a specific student and her very specific progress and see
what you think. I just can't believe it. The student is a 4th grade
girl with dyslexia who I have been fortunate enough to work with
since 1st grade. She has struggled significantly with phonemic
awareness and we have worked on it a lot. She not only has a hard
time coming up with the correct answer, but it seems so painful as
she works at it. She has made some progress in this area over the
past few years, and is actually able to compensate and use her
amazing comprehension to read only 6-8 months below grade level.
Anyway, I have been doing BAVX with her for about 20+ minutes each
day, and she has been teaching my 2nd graders as well. About 3 weeks
ago, we were working on phonemic awareness skills, specifically
deletion, and she began to respond correctly to each question,
and it didn't even seem like much of a struggle! I was extremely
excited, but to be sure, I made a point to work on the same skills
the next day, and every couple of days thereafter, and see if she
had the same success. Well, she definitely did, and on a variety
of skills (deletion, substitution, reversal) and a variety of words.
Again today she had the same success, and I gave her very
challenging words to work with. In addition, she took a spelling
test today and hardly had time to study, about a minute, and got
100% and didn't seem to struggle at all on words like: believe,
business, certain, etc.
Anyway, I am just so excited and had to share this with you. BAVX is
the only reason I can come up with for such a huge turn around in
this specific area.
-Emily Barton, CO
A therapist I work with went to one of your workshops and has been using your program with one of our pre-kindergartner kiddos. We’ve seen some amazing results in regard to gross motor skills, visual motor skills, language, and self-esteem. Across all settings.
-Sheila Hicks, OH
The cooperative element of Bal-A-Vis-X is what makes it the most fascinating to me. Fostering peer involvement among children who have neurological damage is a critical element of their education, yet the one most often ignored. Your program teaches instinctive harmony, teaching the way teaching was meant to be but all too often is not.
-Diane Kerchner, CA
I am writing is because a friend of mine had a head injury a few months back and I suggested your program to her and it reminded me that my friend Debi Wilson said that I needed to tell you the story about bal-a-vis-x and my dad.
My dad died 3 years ago not long after Christmas. But, I got one of the best gifts ever that year. I got my dad back for a short time. My dad started losing "it" fast. He used to say that we were taking turns baby sitting him. Well one day in mid December it was my turn to "baby sit". As a child my dad taught me to play gin rummy and it wasn't in his blood to ever let me win. So feeling nostalgic I asked him to play a few hands with me. His response was that he didn't know how to play. I tried to convience him that he did know very well how to play. So...........he tried for me. It didn't work. All of a sudden I remembered I had some of the balls in the car so I asked him if he would do bal-a-vis-x with me. He mumbled and groaned and then humored me. Well at first he really struggled, the ball was going everywhere. After a short time I started noticing that the cloudiness had left his eyes and even though he was sitting he was keeping up with me and maintaining a rhythm with me. After about 10 minutes he said he was tired and that he wanted to stop. So I said okay dad, you want to play some gin rummy? He said you bet, but I'm gonna beat you. And he did, four hands in a row.
He died about 3 weeks later but your program gave me my daddy back for moment.
-Pam Jones, CA
I was at your conference in the Detroit area last June. As an occupational therapist, I have been using Bal-A-vis-X with all my students--from the severely impaired to those with minor neurological impairments--and I’ve been amazed with the results. The improvements in bilateral coordination, eye-hand coordination, tracking, as well as improvements in handwriting, have been incredible. Of course I also use other therapy modes, but Bal-A-Vis-X has been the most successful.
-Ann Hill, MI
Last year I had a 7th grader who read at the 2nd grade level. I found out his tracking was a huge issue and so we worked diligently on this. He didn't enjoy it because it was so difficult for him to isolate his eye movement from his head movement. But we worked and worked at it. By the end of the year he had gained two entire years in reading! Yes, I cried. I cried because I didn't think of this a year ago and for the time that I lost with him. I will NEVER again have any student in my room without checking this out. No one will ever slip past me again! Too simple of a solution to not at least check! He wanted to move to the town my new job was in when I changed positions this year because he knew how much it helped him!
-Denise Root, OR
Bill, I attended your workshop on Long Island this past summer and wanted to drop you a note. I’ve been using Bal-A-Vis-X with many of the students on my case load (I’m a k-5 occupational therapist) and have already seen, in just a few short weeks, benefits in a variety of ways. Especially poignant is a 2nd grade girl who had a stroke in utero which significantly impaired her left side. Last year she worked on learning yoga postures, to help elongate muscles, and various balance and bilateral activities. This year, in such a short time, the 2-ball rectangle BAVX exercise has done more for her than any yoga posture. Even better, her 15-yr-old brother now has an activity he can do with her. And she’s his teacher!
-Christine Rockett, NY
A____ is the little red-haired student who did not want to be touched when we came to your Lab last week. She has Asperger’s syndrome. But she has blossomed this year in the BAVX program. More than ever I could have imagined she could. Friday she led our session in a rhythm exercise, using the one-ball triangle (bounce-catch-clap) just as she was taught by one of your Lab students. It was unbelievable to watch her as each student joined her one by one. The rhythm . . . it came . . . growing louder and louder . . . the hair on the back of my neck stood up. A____ and rhythm and the others following . . . it was one of those moments. Every child learns. Even if we fail to see it at the time. She was smiling, Bill, and I was so proud of her. Thanks for that one. And, as always, thank your Lab students for me.
-Charles Wilkinson, Wichita
Donaji was picked out by Elsa, school principal, early on when we started doing BAVX at ECA (a public elementary school) in 2004. She was a frightened and very timid little girl with low self-esteem. I vividly remember her in our first session, her eyes glazed, in a kind of stupor, seemingly confused as to what planet she was on. Well, if I could show you Donaji today, Bill. Now she’s a real sparkler! Full of beans, super confident and enthusiastic, and the MOST PASSIONATE girl we have in the whole school for BAVX. It is a total and impressive transformation . . .
-Russell Gibbon, Mexico City
This is the third year I've done Bal-AVis-X with my kindergartners, and I'm still astounded at the results at the end of the year.
During the first year (2006-07) of Bal-A-Vis-X at our school, our fourth-grade buddies introduced Bal-A-Vis-X to my students by holding a bright yellow beanbag in front of the kindergartners' eyes, telling them to look at the bag while they moved it up and down and sideways. One of my students was unable to follow the beanbag at all as it was moved in front of his eyes. Instead he stared blankly ahead. While most kindergartners had some difficulty throwing and catching the beanbags in the beginning, this particular student was unable to do these simple throwing and catching exercises. He also had difficulty remembering the letters of the alphabet and their sounds as well as the numbers we had learned up to that point. Whenever the letters and numbers were covered up during an assessment, he became very frustrated and cried uncontrollably.
I was very concerned about this student, but I was also excited because you'd assured us during the workshop that the tracking problem could be totally reversed with simple exercises. I received permission from the student’s mother to work with him after school one day a week, and so an incredible journey began.
When I tested his eyes with the Vistar ball in the middle of November, they were fixed. His mother was terribly upset when I demonstrated this. But I could share the good news and reassure her that this condition was reversible. I taught her how to do the exercises at home and encouraged her to do them for no more than 3 minutes every day. I did the eye exercises once a week, followed by individual Bal-A-Vis-X exercises. I also did Bal-A-Vis-X with my class about 4 days a week, and he participated as well as he could.
At first the student would talk constantly and blurt out things that had nothing to do with what was going on around him. This happened in the classroom as well. I taught him that Bal-A-Vis-X was a quiet activity and that he had to listen to the bouncing of the ball. As he became more proficient in bouncing the balls, he became more quiet and stopped blurting out. He still had difficulty academically in that he couldn’t remember the letters and sounds or numbers that we had learned up to then. In November when I started his individual Bal-A-Vis-X sessions, his eyes were totally fixed. In December his eyes started to move slightly, but he was not connecting with the ball at all. During the second-quarter assessment in December, he cried because all his visual cues were covered up. He did very poorly on the assessment, not knowing the letters or sounds or numbers. In January he had random eye movements, but he was still not connecting with the ball. He also made very little academic progress, and I had some concerns whether he would be ready for first grade at this rate.
On March 6, during the last eye tracking, he tracked the ball perfectly three times. When I assessed his academic progress for the third quarter a few days after his first successful tracking, for the first time he did not cry when he noticed all the letters and numbers on the walls covered up. And he knew most of the letters, sounds, and numbers taught to date. I noticed that his first academic success occurred at the same time as his first tracking.
As I continued his weekly individual Bal-A-Vis-X sessions, his tracking improved markedly. On April 24 he tracked successfully in all directions. He lost the ball a few times but was able to reconnect with it and track perfectly. On his fourth quarter assessment in May, he wrote the entire alphabet with upper and lower case letters correctly as well as the numbers from 0 to 20 (although he wrote some numbers and letters backwards.) He started to read and write simple words. Whereas I was very concerned about his academic progress in January and could not envision him being ready for first grade, I now felt confident that he was ready and would do well in first grade.
-Bettina Dommisse, AZ