Strong reading skills are essential for success in school. The approaches I use give students the tools to develop reading proficiency. These programs develop the two essential components of reading: decoding skills and comprehension abilities.
Reading is smooth and fluid when students master decoding skills, in other words, when students have learned which sound is represented by a given letter. The key to helping students develop reading decoding skill is to use methods that fully engage the brain. Methods that completely engage the brain also totally engage the senses. My approach fully activates a student’s learning abilities using multi-sensory techniques based in Orton-Gillingham methods.
I combine systematic instruction in sound-symbol relationships with drills that develop a student’s attention and automatic recognition of sounds and letters so that a student will develop the foundational skills essential for reading. This method improves phonemic awareness skills (such as sound blending and rhyming) which are essential to becoming a strong reader.
My strong comprehension programs teach students at all grade levels how to understand and learn more from what they read. I help students develop the skills to focus on the thinking processes needed to understand text. I teach comprehension strategies that promote understanding before, during and after reading to promote significant increases in comprehension skill. Some of the important components of comprehension improved include:
- Using pre-reading techniques to warm up for reading
- Connecting prior knowledge to the current material
- Acquiring new vocabulary words
- Identifying the structure of reading material (for example, cause and effect, description, compare and contrast, etc.)
- Adjusting the reading rate for the difficulty of material and purpose of reading
- Knowing whether the material is comprehended and how to adjust strategies when material is not being adequately understood
- Creating visual images of what is being read
- Focusing attention by asking questions while reading – in other words, being an “active” reader
- Using techniques such as graphic organizers, outlines and color-coding to increase understanding and anchor information in memory
To download an article that discusses the advantages of working with an educational therapist over a tutor to develop your child’s reading proficiency, click on the link below.