What We Do
All of our services are provided in a one-on-one setting, allowing each child’s instruction to be personalized to meet their specific needs and learning style. The pacing of our work is “student-driven”, meaning that we work through the learning process being taught as quickly as the student can absorb the material.
Reading Comprehension
Does your child have a difficult time remembering information they have just read or heard? This is quite often due to a conceptual imagery disorder that affects the ability to retain information. Students with good reading comprehension and oral language skills are able to image or visualize the material they are reading. Not only is the human brain hungry for these images, but it is how the brain stores information for use later in our speech, our writing, and most importantly, information recall.
Students struggling with this type of reading difficulty may display some of the following symptoms:
- reads beautifully but cannot remember what they’ve read, or only remember small bits
- studies hard for a test and on the day of the test has forgotten everything
- explains things in a way that’s brief and vague, OR rambles on and on without a clear point
- cannot answer questions at the end of a chapter, or cannot tell the main idea of a story
- difficulty understanding humor
- may miss social cues
- difficulty with taking notes
- difficulty following movies, especially those with flashback scenes
To remedy a reading comprehension issue, students are taught to visualize or “picture” the material they are reading or hearing. The brain stores these images, providing the learner with a reserve of information from which to draw upon for use in answering questions, writing essays, and taking tests.
Basic Reading Skills
Does your child struggle with the basic skill of sounding out words (word attack), or reading fluently? Many people find reading a challenge due to a phonological processing, phonemic awareness, or an auditory processing deficit. These processing difficulties have nothing to do with hearing loss, but have to do with how the brain processes information about sounds within words.
Has your child’s teacher mentioned “phonemic awareness” or “phonological processing”? These are terms describing the skill we possess that allows us to know if we’ve sounded a word out correctly. It is all the skill that allows us to recognize we’ve made a reading error and how to correct it. Phonemic awareness is not a skill based on intelligence…in fact….many students with this reading issue are gifted!
Students struggling with this type of reading difficulty may display some of the following symptoms:
- adds, omits, shifts or substitutes letters/sounds within words
- For example…reading flim for film, or string for spring
- guesses at words, often looking at the first letter and not sounding out the rest of the word
- older students may read small words correctly, but cannot pronounce large words
- poor spelling skills in written classwork, homework, and writing
When a student struggles with phonemic awareness, the brain can learn to read, but must learn in a non-traditional way. In our multisensory approach to reading, we teach the student to bypass their weaker skill of hearing the difference between sounds in words and teach students to feel the difference between sounds. For example, when you make the sound /t/, your tongue touches the top of your mouth, and it always does when you make that sound. Or the sound /f/ is formed by putting your upper front teeth on your lower lip, and blowing out air. When a student can feel the difference between sounds, then they have a concrete way to self-check their word attack for any word, and determine whether or not they’ve sounded out the word correctly. This program is so successful, that students show years of gain in basic reading skills in a very short amount of time.
Spelling and Sight Words
Your child studies those flash cards for reading, or days preparing for the spelling test on Friday. The next week, they cannot remember those hard-studied words. What happened to their word recognition skills? Most children struggling with these areas have a problem with symbol imagery – being able to visualize letters and words in their minds. This ability to picture a word is how your brain stores the info.
A student can quickly be taught to image letters and entire words, thereby increasing their word recognition skills. By teaching “symbol imagery” not only does word recognition improve, reading fluency improves as well because the student no longer has to sound out each individual word. With the improved word recognition and learning some spelling strategies, spelling is no longer the struggle it once was!