Michelle Slater

There are certain moments in your career that quietly shift how you see everything that comes after. For me, one of those moments happened during a school-wide meeting on reading. I still remember sitting in a school-wide meeting focused on one question everyone cared deeply about: How do we improve reading skills for our students? At that time, I was serving as the Director of Occupational Therapy. I had spent years studying sensory integration, visual motor development, and how these...

The 2022–2023 school year was a turning point. We were finally back in classrooms—but something wasn’t right. But the COVID gap was a barrier. For many of my students in grades 3–8 receiving school-based OT, I kept seeing the same pattern: Bright kids. Strong thinking. Solid support plans. And yet… when it came time to read, it felt like they were hitting a wall that “try harder” couldn’t fix. Not motivation. Not intelligence. Something else. Something physical. When I looked at the data, it...

We’ve all seen that student. The one who can build a complex LEGO masterpiece or explain the life cycle of a star—but when a book opens, the room shifts. The fidgeting starts. Sometimes avoidance. Often distraction. And suddenly, a simple line of text becomes a mountain. As an OT and the founder of Eye Learn Pro, I tend to look at what’s happening underneath that moment—especially with reading. Because when the focus stays only on phonics, it’s easy to miss the invisible physical systems ...