BRMT Level 3 - Reading, Writing, Dyslexia, and Vision

16 hours | Live, synchronous instruction | Accredited

Prerequisite: BRMT Levels One and Two

Some children can decode every word on the page and still have no idea what they just read.

Others sound out the same word for the fifth time as though they've never seen it. Or skip lines. Or tell you the text is jumping. Or get a headache twenty minutes in and quietly stop trying.

They've had the extra reading practice. They've had the remedial support. Many have been practicing at home with a parent on top of everything the school provides — and the reading still hasn't become automatic.

Level Three is about why.

What this course is about

Reading requires a network of skills — visual cortex, speech areas, the frontal lobes that handle grammar and phonetic analysis, the areas controlling eye movements, all coordinated by the prefrontal cortex acting, in Elkhonon Goldberg's phrase, as the brain's chief executive.

For reading to become automatic, each of those areas has to be sufficiently developed, and the connections between them — including across the corpus callosum — have to carry signal fast enough. When they don't, the child's attention is consumed by decoding, and nothing is left over for meaning.

Level Three teaches you to find which part of that network isn't holding, and what to do about it.

The central insight of this course is that vision and motor development are inseparable. Binocular vision, accommodation, and tracking are not innate — they develop through the infant's own movements. Grasping an object and bringing it to the mouth is how hand-eye coordination and fusion develop. Crawling and rocking on hands and knees is how the eyes learn to shift focus from near to far. A child who didn't move well in the first year very often doesn't see well at a desk at eight.

Dr. Blomberg’s Perspective

Current mainstream dyslexia research locates the problem primarily in phonological processing and recommends intensified reading instruction. Dr. Blomberg developed this course from a different position — that in his clinical experience, children with reading difficulties consistently presented with moderate to severe visual challenges that were never asked about, and that motor training and reflex integration addressed causes that reading practice alone could not reach.

This course teaches that clinical framework. It is a complementary lens, not a replacement for the evaluation and support a child may need from a reading specialist, behavioral optometrist, or speech-language pathologist — and the course teaches you when to refer to each of them.

What you will learn

The reading brain

• The neural network of reading and the cortical areas involved

• The prefrontal cortex as the organizer of reading — and why comprehension depends on it

• Sequential and simultaneous processing, and how dyslexia subtypes map onto them

• Hemispheric specialization, and what current PET research has revised about it

• Myelination of the corpus callosum and why cross-lateral movement matters for reading speed

Vision — assessment and clinical reasoning

• How binocular vision, accommodation, and eye movements develop out of infant movement

• Checking fixation before any other visual assessment

• A simple two-pen test for binocular vision, suppression, and suspension

• Fusion testing

• Hyperopia, accommodation, and convergence

• Eye movements and the establishment of eye dominance

• The Saccadic Eye Movement Screening Test, with age-referenced norms

• The visual symptoms children never report and adults never ask about: blurring, jumping text, skipped lines, eye pain, headaches, fatigue, avoidance

Which reflex is driving which visual problem

This is the clinical core of the course — reading a visual finding backward to the reflex producing it:

• Moro — esophoria at near and far distance

• STNR — impaired accommodation, hyperopia, near-point esophoria that improves with reading glasses

• TLR — cross-eyed tendency, binocular vision difficulty, spatial orientation on the page, spacing between words and paragraphs

• ATNR — strabismus, and impaired pursuit eye movements from unintegrated midline reflexes

Writing

• Why writing difficulty is rarely just the Babkin reflex

• The Grasp reflex and pencil grip, pressure, shoulder tension, and laborious penmanship

• The Hands Pulling reflex and forearm tension

• The ATNR's contribution to shoulder, arm, and finger tension

• Why a child fighting their own hand can't attend to what they wanted to say

Speech, attention, and stress

• The cerebellar pathway to the speech areas of the left frontal lobe, and why speech often improves rapidly once rhythmic movement begins

• Why difficulty performing the rhythmic movements smoothly is itself a clinical finding

• Attention and comprehension difficulties as a function of insufficient cortical arousal

• Why the prefrontal cortex disconnects under stress — and when integrating Fear Paralysis and Moro is the necessary first step

The reflexes covered

STNR · TLR · Fear Paralysis · Moro · ATNR · Babkin · Plantar · Grasp · Hands Pulling

A working protocol

You'll leave with a sequenced approach: questionnaire, the four basic active movements and rocking on hands and knees, accommodation and near-point testing one eye at a time, STNR testing and isometric integration performed while the client fixates on a point, ATNR testing and integration, tracking work, and Fear Paralysis and Moro integration where indicated.

And when to refer. The course is explicit about the limits of this work — when visual challenges persist after reflex integration and a behavioral optometrist is needed, when to involve an osteopath, a speech-language pathologist, or an auditory processing program.

Two cases from the manual

Maria, twelve, with cerebral palsy — shuffling gait, poor articulation, hunched posture, weak arms, unable to hold her head upright, reading only single words with text that jumped on the page. Nearly every midline reflex was active, along with TLR, STNR, and Spinal Galant. After a few months her reading improved. After six months she learned to run. After a year she read without her reading glasses, her fusion had normalized at near distance, and she was playing basketball.

A Swedish school identified nine third-graders reading at a second-grade level, months before the move to fourth grade. Rather than hire a remedial teacher, they ran rhythmic movement training and reflex integration once a week, with parents doing daily exercises at home. No additional reading instruction was added. After three months, all but one student tested as normal readers for grade three — a year of reading development in three months, through motor training alone.

Who this course is for

Practitioners who have completed BRMT Levels One and Two and work with:

• Children with dyslexia, reading difficulties, or writing difficulties

• Children who decode adequately but don't comprehend

• Visual complaints around reading — blurring, jumping text, headaches, avoidance

• Poor handwriting, pencil grip, and hand fatigue

• Speech and articulation difficulties

• Attention difficulties that show up most in reading

Particularly relevant for occupational therapists, behavioral optometrists, vision therapists, reading specialists, speech-language pathologists, and educators.

What you'll leave with

You will be able to take a child with a reading difficulty and work out which parts of the reading network aren't holding — through history, simple visual assessment, and reflex testing. You'll know which reflex to suspect from a given visual finding, which movements and isometric integrations to use, in what order, and when the answer is a referral rather than more movement.

This is the level where reading difficulty stops looking like a mystery.