Even after children have acquired basic reading skills, they may experience problems with reading fluency or reading comprehension.  These problems are also due to specific language-based weaknesses.  By third or fourth grade, children must transition from "learning to read" to "reading to learn".  Reading problems affect all academic subjects, and can cause children to fall behind in school, even when they are trying their best.  Research shows that children who are reading below grade level in third grade rarely "catch up" to their current grade level, and they typically read well below grade level throughout their academic education.  We can diagnose and treat the problems that are holding your child back.

Tutoring is an educational service that involves group or 1:1 teaching and homework support for particular academic subjects.  It is focused on helping a student to learn grade level material in a particular subject or curriculum.  Approaches and materials are similar to those used in the classroom.  Tutors typically do not have the qualifications or certification needed to administer and interpret formal norm-based standardized tests for the diagnosis of learning or language disorders.  They also do not treat the underlying processing deficits associated with language-based learning disorders such as dyslexia.

Treatment is an intensive remedial approach that addresses specific identified skill deficits which underlie learning difficulties.  Treatment is individualized for each client's particular learning profile, and their strengths and weaknesses.  The process begins at the level needed to fill in gaps in skills and knowledge, and proceeds systematically.  For example, a first grader who is struggling with reading or spelling may have deficits in any of a number of basic phonological skill areas:  phonological awareness, phonologic memory, visual memory, or phonemic sequencing.   A fifth grader may have poor reading fluency that is due to underlying deficits in rapid linguistic retrieval,  phonological awareness, memory, or word segmentation skills.  Because of these weaknesses, they may have failed to learn vowel rules and linguistic patterns that are critical for success in reading and spelling.  If these foundational skills are not acquired, reading and writing will become increasingly burdensome, and academic learning will suffer in higher grade levels. 

With treatment, the focus is not on teaching a particular academic subject, but on building and strengthening the underlying skills needed for success in all subjects.   For example, if a child struggles with reading comprehension we may use their social studies textbook in a treatment session, but our focus will be on building skills in parsing, processing, comprehending, and organizing the written language in that book, rather than on mastery of a specific subject.  This results in improved reading comprehension across all subjects.

We work to improve spelling not by drilling on specific word lists, but by strengthening underlying skills in phonological awareness and visual sequential memory, and by increasing knowledge of vowel patterns, syllable types, morphology, common word  patterns, secret spelling rules, and prefixes and suffixes.

If your child has difficulty tackling written assignments, they may be overwhelmed by the myriad of tasks involved in producing written language, rather than with the subject matter itself.  We can teach your child how to pre-plan their writing, brainstorm and organize their ideas, write cohesive paragraphs and reports, create descriptive sentences with sentence pattern variety, improve their writing mechanics (punctuation, spelling, etc), and how to systematically proof their work for errors.