Each lesson is individually tailored for your child's interests, strengths, and challenges. A typical lesson would have the following general format:
1) Review of previous teachings. This could include letter-sound correspondences, syllable types, phonemic awareness skills, spelling patterns, irregularly-spelled words, meaningful parts of words (roots, prefixes, suffixes), and any words or concepts that need more attention.
2) Teaching of new material, using face-to-face discussion and annotation of slideshows.
3) Practice of new and previous teachings, through various exercises, including guided oral reading, spelling from dictation, and fluency training.
The instruction covers the following skills:
Phoneme Awareness
The ability to identify and manipulate the sounds of the English language is critical for success for successful reading and spelling. If the student has difficulty processing the sounds of spoken language, learning the connections between the sounds and the letters will also be difficult. At the first tutoring session, I assess the student's phoneme awareness skills and, if any there are any gaps, I make a plan for incorporating the necessary training into the reading and spelling lessons.
Letter-Sound Relationships
In English, there is not always a one-to-one relationship between the letters and the sounds. This makes English spelling seem unpredictable. I perform an assessment and provide instruction to ensure that the student has a solid foundation in this area.
Phonics and Morphology
The spelling patterns of the language are presented in a logical sequence, with frequent explorations of the history of the words and the history of the English language (which I find fascinating!). The student also learns how to use prefixes and suffixes to build words.
The instruction is systematic, cumulative and diagnostic. Multi-sensory strategies are emphasized. Each lesson is taught until mastery before moving to the next. Errors are detected and corrected immediately, in order to prevent incorrect habits.
The student's progress is documented and reported to the parent, or adult student, by means of brief progress reports which are emailed on a weekly basis along with the invoice.
If you have any questions, please call or email me, Marian, at (614)599-8618 or logic.of.reading@gmail.com.