Reading

Our Approach

Before tutoring begins, we identify the underlying causes of a student's reading challenges and then develop a customized tutoring plan to address specific needs. While we use a variety of methodologies in our tutoring, our core reading curriculum helps students develop reading skills by writing about what they read. This improves comprehension because they delve deeply into what they are reading and sharpen their critical thinking skills. This approach also enhances their writing skills!

Individualized, one-to-one tutoring is a strong fit for gifted and twice exceptional students. We also have experience supporting students with learning differences such as slow processing speed, weak working memory, ADHD, and autism.

Elementary Students

We work hard to help your child develop the skills they need to become a confident, joyful reader! Here's how we do that:

• Learning to read: For students who are still in the process of learning to read, we heavily focus on phonics, decoding, and word segmentation skills. If they are ready, we also will begin to do some basic reading comprehension work.
• Reading comprehension: Many upper elementary students have mastered the basics of reading and are able to identify and decode words successfully. We focus on teaching active reading comprehension strategies with a combination of short non-fiction reading passages, short stories, and ability-appropriate chapter books.

Middle and High School Students

With our middle and high school students, we work on reading in the context of their school classes:

• Literature reading strategies: For students who struggle with comprehending books and literature, we emphasize active reading strategies such as annotation. We also we discuss, deconstruct, and write about the text in order to deepen understanding.
• Textbook reading strategies: It's normal for students to be challenged by the language and content found in many textbooks. For these students, we teach a variety of reading strategies, including how to take effective notes. Although it may not seem like it, note-taking is a key reading comprehension strategy because it forces students to pull the main ideas from the passage.
• Reading support strategies: Sometimes students have not mastered the underlying skills needed to be a successful reader. For example, they may read more slowly than their brain processes information, or they may not know how to effectively decode and segment unfamiliar words. We can support students who need help in these areas as well!

Summer

The summer is a great time to improve reading skills. In our summer programs, we use high-interest texts to spark excitement about reading!

Getting Started

If you’d like to help your child become a stronger and more confident reader, contact us today!