Reading is a life-long necessity for every student.  But it is not always so easy for every learner! Some grow frustrated and start to believe that reading is an impossible goal.  But it doesn't have to be! With the right tools and instruction, all students can grow in their confidence and mastery of literacy skills, and more importantly, grow to love working with letters! As a certified reading and elementary education teacher, I have over 12 years of experience teaching in grades 1-4.  I have a Masters degree in language and literacy, I am National Board Certified, and I also have finished training in LETRS, a two-year long educator course based around the Science of Reading.

This is an ongoing, 1:1 tutoring class.  I will use our first lesson to assess your child and find where they are in their learning.  For new learners, this may be at the very beginning:  learning letters and sounds.  For the struggling reader, we may start at letters and sounds if that is what they need, but typically struggling readers just have gaps in their learning foundation and do not need to go back to the beginning of reading instruction.  

Once students are beyond letters and sounds, we will progress through reading foundational skills, including decoding consonant-vowel-consonant words, then progressing through digraphs, silent e, blends, and r-controlled vowels.  Once students are ready, we will also tackle multisyllabic words, schwa sound, and vocabulary.

For the older reader who is past learning to decode, we will work on improving comprehension, answering text-based questions, and learning about author's purpose, main idea, theme, context clues, inferences, and supporting details.  These readers may bring a book they are working on in school, or I will provide materials.  

This is a 45 minute class for grades Kindergarten through 5th.  I can also work with older students who are struggling with decoding skills.

The first 1-2 classes will be assessment-driven so that I can find the student's strengths and weaknesses and give us a starting point.
After, each class will be tailored to their needs and may include:  interactive slides games, activities, songs, writing, and reading.  We will also work on phonemic and phonological awareness, phonics patterns, rereading past texts, sight or "heart" words, spelling, writing words and sentences, and reading new texts that are written in decodable patterns or are high-interest in nature.