TUTORING FOR STRUGGLING READERS

I am a trained Orton-Gillingham tutor and former elementary school teacher with a degree in Early Childhood General and Special Education. In tutoring, I will first assess your student's decoding and encoding (reading and spelling) skills, and then use that information to determine which skills I think are ready to learn next. (NOTE: I am not a diagnostician, and cannot determine whether or not your student has dyslexia. I am only assessing reading/spelling skills in order to find an effective starting point in tutoring.)

I will then tutor using a program called Orton-Gillingham Plus, created by Fran Bowman. Orton-Gillingham Plus tutoring is not "homework help". This is a systematic program designed to help your student master the sound/spelling linkages needed to crack the code of the English language and become a more fluent reader and more accurate speller.

This program is:

SYNTHETIC - Students will be explicitly taught a sound/spelling linkage and THEN asked to read/spell words that have those linkages. They won't have to "pick up on patterns" or play reading guessing games.

PHONETIC - We focus on the sounds that make up words and connecting those sounds to letters/groups of letters.

MULTISENSORY - We use mirrors, pom poms, whiteboards, slinkys and more! (See Supply List.) Students can better engage with and retain new skills when they're using all their senses to learn.

CUMULATIVE - In general, we do not move on to a new skill until I think your student has mastered the previous reading skill. Students will not have to become overwhelmed with applying lots of new information at once.

In general, each lesson contains:
-Phonological awareness practice
-review of sound-spelling linkages already learned
-review of irregular sight words
-new sight words
-new sound-spelling linkage
-practice reading and spelling words/sentences using the new sound-spelling linkage
-reading a passage for fluency