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. It is these visual images the brain is hungry for...and how it stores information.

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 and studies for a test, and the day of the test, has forgotten everything
• when explaining something, is very brief and vague, or rambles on and on, and you still don't know what
  they are talking about
• cannot answer questions at the end of a chapter, or cannot tell the main idea of a story

To remedy a reading comprehension issue, students are taught to visualize or "picture" the material they are reading. The brain stores these images, provising the learner to draw upon them 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 or auditory processing deficit. This has nothing to do with hearing loss, but has to do with how the brain processes information about sounds.

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, and if we haven't to correct our error. 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 sounds within words...example...reading flim for film.
• 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
  

When a student struggles with phonemic awareness, the brain can learn to read, but must learn in a non-traditional way. We bypass the 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 word attack 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 not only letters, but entire words, thereby increasing their word recognition skills. By teaching "symbol imagery", not only does word recognition improve, but reading fluency does 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!

Math
Does you child have difficulty learning both math concepts as well as computation?

Signs of this will include:

• difficulty learning math facts, such as multiplication tables
• trouble grasping math relationships
• cannot solve word problems

An inability to image numbers and math concepts can affect the ability to solve math problems, as the ability to image is how the brain stores information. By combining the ability to image the concepts of math with the use of manipulatives... difficulties with math can be overcome!

Bridging Program
When students have completed a math or reading program, we begin a bridging program to transition them into using their new skills in conjunction with the week's homework from school.

Students in the Bridging Program attend one session per week for 4 weeks. During those sessions, the student and instructor work on applying new techniques and strategies directly to their school work.

Kindergarten Prep
Kindergarten is no longer the easy transition into elementary school. Standards have changed, and kindergartners are now learning beginning math and reading skills. Our Kindergarten Prep program teaches pre-K children sound-symbol associations for letters, number recognition and counting, as well as shapes and colors....all in a fun, low-key atmosphere!
Available in summer only.

Free reading skills screening available. Call today, space is limited!

619-640-6835