Being able to listen and process what’s being heard and read is essential for academic success. We specialize with students with difficulties processing language, students with reading comprehension difficulties, students diagnosed with dyslexia, and students with fluency issues (students who are slow readers, inaccurate readers, and/or don’t sound natural when reading aloud).
We want your child to feel good about literacy and we ascribe to a balanced literacy approach; we take advantage of a variety of techniques and tools that aid in literacy development, including a multisensory approach. The Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read discusses evidence based techniques to facilitate literacy development.
Our specialized intervention focuses on improving the student’s listening and/or reading comprehension skills: vocabulary (nouns, action words), grammar (understanding complex sentences, paragraphs, directions), and improving organization to help facilitate what they heard or read.
Sharing is caring. We let the students in on what we’re doing so they can be part of the process. We also take their interests, strengths and learning style into account maximizing effectiveness and ensuring the students don’t get frustrated. After all we’re not trying to fit any square pegs into round holes. So if your child likes music and flying saucers, they’re in! Drawing and imaginary animals? For sure! These skills are targeted independently for remediation and they are also implemented in the student’s curriculum
Literacy is fun. We have a veritable toolbox of tools to help your child. We will make them feel oh-so-good about literacy. We teach strategies to facilitate comprehending language and these include: using preparatory sets (before reading/hearing a story, activate background knowledge about the material, discussing unfamiliar vocabulary words, making predictions about the material), using visual aids, e.g. visual and verbal organizers, understanding story grammar (make story maps-who is the main character, what did the main character do, etc.) comprehension monitoring to help students be aware when they do not understand what they read or what they heard, repeating information, summarizing, paraphrasing, visual imagery, self-question strategies, e.g. what’s the main idea, asking questions after reading or listening to a passage to monitor what they are comprehending, understanding character’s plans and intentions (including creating illustrations), using imaginary play to act out comprehension, drawing pictures to illustrate understanding what they are reading or listening, understanding pronouns and connecting pronouns to characters in the stories, understanding word relations and conjunctions, e.g. temporal, e.g. then, after, etc., and oppositional relation words, e.g. but, though, etc.
