What is Literacy Tutoring?

Most simply, Literacy Tutoring involves specialized tutoring in all of the areas of literacy! Skills are taught in an explicit and systematic way with lots of chances for review in order to gain mastery. Whenever possible, skills will be taught integrated together and not in isolation.

My methods and activities are based on decades of research now known as the Science of Reading.

This evolving body of research has clearly determined how the brain learns to read and what activities are the most beneficial. This research also debunks many popular — yet possibly harmful — methods that many students are currently being taught in schools. This research has shown the most effective ways to teach all children – even those with learning difficulties – to read. It has become a personal mission of mine to learn all I can about the reading brain and the most effective literacy practices that are backed by evidence.

Specific lessons will be tailored to the unique needs of your child and may include any or all of the concepts below:

Phonological Awareness: rhyming, alliteration, syllable awareness, etc.

Phonemic Awareness: individual sounds, blending and segmenting sounds, manipulating sounds, etc.

Phonics: letter names and sounds, digraphs, vowel teams and diphthongs, blending and decoding skills, etc.

Fluency: automaticity, attending to punctuation, phrasing, expression, self-correction, inflection, appropriate rate, etc.

Spelling: phoneme-grapheme mapping, spelling generalizations, irregular words, etc.

Vocabulary: homophones and homographs, synonyms, antonyms, context clues, adjectives, nouns, verbs, using morphology, etc.

Morphology: Latin and Greek roots, prefixes, suffixes, inflectional endings, suffixing spelling conventions, etc.

Comprehension: making predictions and inferences, using our schemas, asking questions, making connections, summarization, fact/opinion, cause/effect, main idea, etc.