Language Tutoring - Choose the area of language that you wan

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The Orton-Gillingham approach to phonics focuses on both reading and spelling using multi-sensory stragegies.  These strategies are designed to help get phonics skills into a student's long-term memory.  Students are encouraged to use reasoning to come up with the possible spelling choices, or sound choices based on information they have been directly taught.  Lessons target the sounds letters make, spelling rules, syllable patterns, syllable division rules, and non-phonetic words, which are words that can't be sounded out. 

Morphology involves knowledge about prefixes, roots, suffixes, and connectives, and how to use this knowledge for reading and spelling high level words with Latin or Greek origins.  Students learn how to determine word meanings based on the morphological components of a given word.  This knowledge also gives clues as to how these words should be spelled or read.

Many times once the decoding piece has been remediated, comprehension comes more naturally to a  student; however sometimes a student can still struggle with understanding what is being read.  Teaching a student to visualize a narrative as it unfolds may be the issue.  Most readers form mental images as they read a narrative, but some readers do not.  The technique of visualizing can be directly taught to students.  This allows the reader to be more actively involved with the narration and encourages information to make it into the long-term memory.

The process of getting one's thoughts down on paper can be difficult for some students, so we can help by breaking down the process into more manageable chunks.  This helps alleviate anxiety for the student.   Additionally, students who don't have a solid understanding of the parts of speech might have difficulty writing complete sentences, which in turn creates issues when they need to write well constructed paragraphs or multi-paragraph essays.  Knowledge about how words are related to each other in sentences, and how sentences  are related to each other in  paragraphs can improve a student's writing as well as increase their comprehension of a text.  

Phonological awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate sounds and syllables in the spoken word.  Students who struggle with connecting sounds to symbols (phonics), often have a deficit in the phonological awareness component.  Phonological awareness involves hearing and producing rhyming words, identifying syllables, and separating and moving around the individual sounds that make up the spoken word.  This deficit can not only be present in preschool or kindergarten children, but it can also be present in highschool students and adults.  This skill is foundational for having the ability to read and spell words using phonics, and it can be directly taught.  

Tutoring can be done in person or online.  If you don't see your area of need listed here on this page, contact us to see if we can provide the appropriate instruction you are seeking.