Dyslexia Reading Tutor

“If you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything.” – Tomie dePaola

Strong phonological skills are the cornerstone of proficient reading. The ability to decode, or sound out words, forms the basis for learning to read and understand text.

Children who struggle to decode are so exhausted by the effort needed to sound out individual words that they have no energy left for comprehension; thus, they have trouble understanding and remembering what they have read.

For successful, fluent readers the process of learning to read may have been simple and fairly automatic. If your child has not grasped the rules of reading, an explicit approach to reading and spelling patterns will help them make connections between sounds and letters and help them learn to approach unfamiliar, complex words.

Subsequent to the acquisition of basic phonemic awareness skills, students will move on to the more complex skills that will allow them to comprehend increasingly sophisticated text and bring reading to life. Karen has found that while children with dyslexia and significant reading disabilities need explicit remedial instruction, all children benefit from learning the vowel patterns, spelling rules, and multisyllable decoding strategies that set the stage for proficiency in reading and writing.

Karen brings to her business more than ten years of experience using the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS) program and Orton-Gillingham Approach to increase phonemic awareness and teach children the decoding and spelling skills they need to become confident, proficient readers. She incorporates fun, interesting reading and vocabulary-building activities into each session, reinforcing her students’ previously learned skills and challenging them to acquire new ones.

In Karen’s many years of experience as a reading tutor, she has seen the approach she uses work wonders with beginning readers, struggling readers, and children with dyslexia.

One of her former students struggled to read pre-primer books; he had extreme difficulty recognizing and remembering basic sight words, and he had a very hard time spelling two- and three-letter words. He was frustrated with the entire process. However, once he developed strong phonological awareness and a clear understanding of spelling patterns, his reading skills skyrocketed and he was able to read increasingly complex text with confidence. A year later, after he had successfully read several pages from one of the Magic Treehouse books, he beamed, “Ms. Karen, I’m a reader and a speller!”

Students who begin tutoring are screened using assessments to identify their current skill level and the best course of instruction for them.