They did it!

Well, they surprise even me! Marie did wonderful, and made tremendous progress with her reading, especially with her fluency in comprehension. Her word recognition scores improved by 2 years, and fluency levels the same. I am so pleased! Marie began to demonstrate the appropriate skills needed to continue her work on her own and showed a great deal more confidence.

As for Mark, though he has a long road ahead of him, he gained a full year in word recognition and fluency as well. He still struggles, and has some improvements to make, and yet he is well on his way. We all suspect that there are other issues to deal with...such as the possiblity of dyslexia, but we are taking a break for now so that Mark can focus on his school work and just being a kid for the time being. Perhaps we'll pick back up at a later date, we shall see.

I have learned so much from these two students and had a wonderful time working with them.

Can't wait to see what's next!!

If you would like further information about these students and their progress, please let me know!

We do that.

The National Reading Panel, in 2000, supported the use of repeated reading practice to improve fluency in elementary students. We do that.

The Center on Instruction further reports an even higher impact of repeated reading & corrective feedback for adults and adolescents on comprehension & fluency. We do that.

We love to teach people to read. It's what we do! Let us know if you would like to join us! We do that.

Tutoring on School nights

We are 17 sessions into our 20! Both students, brother & sister, are doing very well. I always find it amazing (even in my own household) how different two children can be. The brother, we'll call him Mark, is doing wonderful with his lessons, but has a very difficult time focusing for long periods of time, and has very little interest in anything related to schoolwork. He does much better on our Saturday lessons when he has not had a full day of school and homework. His sister, let's call her Marie, could work for hours at a time. Mark is struggling more with basic reading and decoding, where Marie is having some difficulty in that area, but is having more difficulty with comprehension and recall.
So, with Mark we are working with the Beacon Literacy Development Remedial Reading Program as it is traditionally set up and have not deviated from it's methods and procedures. He seems to be doing very well with this. We spend about 30 minutes per session. I try not to let lessons run longer than that, as he begins to lose focus. Beacon lessons, typically do not last longer than anyway, but with students like Mark, you sometimes get to stop in the middle of session and "chat" about other things :). I am very anxious to test him and see what gains he is making.
I started Marie with Beacon lessons, but doubled them up. We worked on those for about 10 sessions, give or take, and now we are using the Beacon methods with other materials. At the moment, we are Brigance Building Skills. I am quite surprised, at grade 6, at how unfamiliar Marie seems to be with answering basic comprehension and vocabulary questions. We are spending a great deal of time of that.
We will see how things go! I will be testing both students in about two weeks and then we will determine if we need to continue with our sessions.