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How to Use Your Child’s Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account Funds for Tutoring

Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account
Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program gives parents the option to choose how they want to spend funds allocated to their child’s education. They can use this money for private school, educational materials, or tutoring, amongst other education-related expenses. If you are a parent of a child with special education needs, using these funds for specialized one-on-one tutoring can help your child excel academically. You may want to consider using your Empowerment Scholarship Account for tutoring in reading, writing, or math, as follows:

Reading

If your child has dyslexia or struggles with reading, applying your ESA funds to dyslexia tutoring using the Orton Gillingham method can help your child develop much stronger reading and spelling skills. With this method, students develop core reading and writing skills using a multi-sensory approach. Young children will begin by learning the names of the letters and their corresponding sounds using tools such as audio-visual flash cards, colored sand, magnetic tiles, and white boards. Once they have grasped the names of the letters and their corresponding sounds, they will learn how to blend sounds together to form basic two and three letter words. From there, they will learn to decode and spell more complex words, including words containing blends, consonant digraphs, vowel digraphs, silent e patterns, r-controlled patterns, multi-syllabic words, and so on. Applying your child’s ESA funds to Orton Gillingham tutoring can help their reading and spelling skills improve significantly.
For reading comprehension, your child can learn to become a more active reader with specialized tutoring using the tri-colored highlighting strategy. With this strategy, they will learn identify the topic, which is one, two or three words, describing the passage, and highlight it in blue. Next, they will identify the main idea, which is what the author is saying about the topic and highlight it in green. Finally, they will look for the important details from the passage and highlight them in yellow. Your child will then learn how to write a well-written summary describing the passage along with a structured written response. Using your ESA funds towards specialized reading comprehension tutoring can truly help your child excel.

Writing

Many children, including those with and without learning challenges, struggle with writing. By applying your Arizona EFA funds to specialized writing tutoring, your child can build much stronger writing skills. They can learn how to brainstorm, write, and self-check their thoughts on paper in an organized fashion, and can learn how to write well-constructed sentences, simple paragraphs, extended paragraphs, and five paragraph essays.
A simple paragraph is comprised of five sentences: a topic sentence, three details, and a conclusion sentence. Your child will learn how to brainstorm, write, and self-check four different types of simple paragraphs: example, process, reason, and compare/contrast. Once they have grasped the simple paragraph, they will move onto the extended paragraph, which extends the simple paragraph by adding three supporting detail sentences after each detail. Finally, when ready, your child will learn how to write a well-structured five paragraph essay, comprised of an introduction paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph.
Specialized tutoring using your child’s ESA funds can help them create visual brainstorm diagrams before they begin writing, which will help them organize their thoughts; they will then learn how to convert each of their brainstorm bubbles into a full sentence when writing. Your child will also learn how to self-check their writing, building stronger executive functioning skills along with key writing skills.

Mathematics

Many children have difficulty with various aspects of math, including computation, math fact fluency, and solving word problems. Specialized math tutoring using your child’s ESA funds can help them build these key skills. We start by ensuring that your child’s foundational skills in math are intact, then build upwards to strengthen their fundamental math computation skills. We also teach them strategies for breaking down and solving math word problems, such as the COINS technique, which stands for circle, operation, information, number sentence, and solution sentence. With this technique, we teach your child to move from language to arithmetic and back to language when solving math word problems.
Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program can help you create an individualized educational plan that is most suited to your child’s needs. Applying these ESA funds to specialized one-on-one tutoring will help your child thrive academically.

Dear Dr. Levy, My son received an excellent report card. I can’t say enough good things about his EBL tutor. She has done a tremendous job helping him improve his reading and writing skills. Most importantly, she is wise and kind. She is always patient with him. Because of his tutor, my son writes with much more ease.
– Parent