Students with dyslexia typically struggle with decoding words and reading fluently. They may also have difficulty with spelling and expressing their thoughts effectively when writing. As students progress through school, these skills become increasingly important and can affect nearly every subject. Help your child thrive with dyslexia tutoring that is customized to their individual needs. How can dyslexia tutoring help your child?

Decoding Basic Words

Many students struggle to decode basic single syllable words when reading. They may have difficulty learning sound-letter relationships, including short vowels sounds, and often struggle to blend these sounds together to form words. This challenge can create frustration and lead to poor self-esteem. Dyslexia tutoring or, more specifically, Orton Gillingham tutoring using the Orton Gillingham technique, can help your child strengthen these key skills. This multi-sensory approach to tutoring engages the visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic modalities and can help students master these foundational reading skills.

If your child struggles to learn the names of the letters and their corresponding sounds, Orton Gillingham tutoring can help build these skills, starting at a basic foundational level. For example, a tutor might hold up a flash card that has the lower case letter “a” on the front and the key picture of an apple on the back. The tutor might say to the student, “This is the letter a, like apple, it makes the sound /a/.” The student would then repeat that language out loud along with the Orton Gillingham tutor and then say it independently on their own. Next, the tutor may move onto skywriting and the tutor would write in the sky with their finger, “around, up, and down”, saying the formation of the lower case letter “a” aloud. Then the student would write the same letter in the sky along with the teacher and then independently on their own. Next, the Orton Gillingham tutor may take out a tray of colored sand or shaving cream and practice the same writing exercise in the sand or cream, again saying the formation of the letter aloud as they write it. Next, the student might complete Orton Gillingham workbook pages and then do exercises where they blend sounds together to form words, using tools such as flash cards or magnetic tiles. The more multi-sensory the Orton Gillingham tutoring can be, the better!

Decoding Multi-Syllabic Words

Some students can accurately read basic, single syllable words, but struggle to decode multi-syllabic words. An Orton Gillingham tutor can teach students strategies for breaking down and decoding multi-syllabic words. For example, an Orton Gillingham tutor may teach the student what a compound word is: two little words that are combined to form a big word. They might learn that certain words have endings, like est, ed, ing, or ful, and how to syllabicate these types of words. They might learn the “rabbit” syllabication rule, where the word is split between the two middle consonants, like in the word rabbit. By learning how to break down longer words into their smaller parts with Orton Gillingham tutoring, students can learn to more accurately decode longer, multi-syllabic words.

Reading Fluency

Many students, especially those with dyslexia, exert so much energy into decoding words that their reading fluency is slow. Learning to accurately decode words through Orton Gillingham tutoring can help students develop their reading fluency, but your child’s dyslexia tutor can also use specific strategies, like the choral reading technique, to build their reading fluency skills. The dyslexia tutor may select a passage form a book and use this strategy as follows:

1. Your child reads the passage aloud to the tutor as an initial read.
2. The tutor reads the same passage aloud to your child to model good fluency.
3. Your child reads the same passage aloud WITH the tutor‎, trying to keep up with their fluency.
4. Your child reads the same passage aloud one more time, and their dyslexia tutor empowers them with the improvement in their fluency!

As students move through school, they will be required to read and write increasingly complex material. Dyslexia tutoring can help your child develop stronger reading and writing skills and enable them to thrive as the demands of school continue to increase.

The post How can Tutoring Help your Child with Dyslexia? appeared first on EBL Coaching.

Most children look forward to the last day of school and the first day of summer break. They can’t wait to swim, play outside, and relax with their friends at a park. Yet summer is a long stretch of time, and without continuous learning, students face a real risk of summer slide. In fact, research tells us that over the summer students can lose up to 39% of the information they learned during the school year! Help your child avoid the summer slide with the ideas detailed below.

Create a summer reading plan 

It’s important that kids continue to read throughout the summer, despite the temptation to ditch all books and focus on play. Help your child set a goal for the summer – it could be reading four books, for example, or devoting a certain amount of time each day to reading. Encourage your child to find a series they like or take a trip to the book store and peruse different genres of books with them. If your child chooses to carve out a certain amount of time each day to read, like 30 minutes or so, help them pick a daily time. It might be right before bed or even right after they wake up; the key is choosing a consistent time slot. You might even try setting aside family reading time – maybe right after dinner – when everyone in the family comes together and reads a book of their choosing.

Make math real!

There are so many great real life opportunities for practicing math over the summer. For younger children, bring them to the supermarket with you and build math into your shopping. Grab three peaches and two plums and ask them how many pieces of fruit you have altogether. Then ask how many pieces would be left if you ate one of the peaches. You can do these basic addition and subtraction problems with just about any items in the supermarket. For older kids, you might ask questions like, “This $6 box of cereal is 10% off. What will the new price be?” or “I have a coupon for $5 off two packs of paper towels that are each $15. How much will I spend on paper towels if I use this coupon and buy two packs?”
You can also try playing math games on the road. For instance, if you are driving on a highway with numbered exits and you are at exit 5, ask your child how many more exits you need to pass to reach exit 21. For older kids, you might tell them you have 100 miles left in your road trip. If you are driving 60 miles per hour, how much more time do you have until you reach your destination? Rather than telling your child to work out of a math workbook or complete worksheets, which they may complain is “boring”, try integrating math into your day-to-day summer activities. Read more about these ideas at https://eblcoaching.com/how-to-avoid-the-summer-slide-and-get-ready-for-back-to-school/

Write in a journal 

Writing is a key skill for success, and one that becomes increasingly important as students progress through school. Help your child maintain their writing skills over the summer by encouraging them to write in a journal. This could a general task, like spending 15 minutes per day writing in their journal about any topic they wish. Alternatively, it can be activity-specific. For instance, if you take them to a water park one day, have them write about which slides they went on and foods they ate while at the park. Likewise, if they spend a day at camp, visiting grandparents, or playing baseball outside, have them create a journal entry on activities they did that day and parts that they did or did not like about it. Writing tutoring to build this skill may help as well. The more writing, the better!

Build skills by baking

Most kids love to bake, whether it’s brownies, cupcakes, or corn muffins. Why not build some learning into this fun activity? Start by pulling a recipe  and ask your child to measure out the ingredients required for the recipe, like 1.5 cups of flour, 2 tablespoons of oil, 1 teaspoon of salt, and so on, to help build measurement skills. You might also ask them how much more of each ingredient you would need if you doubled each recipe, or how much less you would need if you cut the recipe in half. You can have them weigh different items and work on conversions from ounces to pounds, or vice versa. Keep it fun (and delicious) and they will build key math skills along the way.

Summer is a time for fun and play, but learning should never be completely neglected. Help your child continue building their key academic skills and avoid the dreaded summer slide with these ideas. You can also try summer tutoring or specific tutoring in reading, writing, or math during summer break. In doing so, you will help set your child up for success in the new school year.

The post Help Your Child Avoid The Summer Slide appeared first on EBL Coaching.