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Welcome
| We offer specialized tutoring for children in a stimulating and esteem building environment. Our tutoring is done in your home allowing for flexibility in scheduling.
Since every child is different, our one-on-one tutoring allows for an approach tailor-made for your child’s abilities, skill level, and learning speed.
Our methods are based on Orton-Gillingham and Lindamood-Bell techniques.
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| Ron Dumoff has a Ph.D in Psychology (Human Performance). After 30 years working as a human performance and systems analysis professional in the corporate information technology field, Ron now applies his professional and analytical skills helping children learn to read. He has been trained to use the Lindamood-Bell approach which he has integrated with techniques and materials from other programs and sources. | |
| Focus of Curriculum: |
| Phonemic Awareness
Some children do not have the basic understanding that words are made up of individual units of sound, or phonemes. Critical to developing reading skills is acquiring this awareness.
Word Attack
Word attack is the ability to skillfully sound out words—to convert individual letters and chunks of letters in a word into language. Children often sound out words incorrectly and are unable to correct themselves.
Sight Words
In addition to decoding, or sounding out words, good reading skills also include recognizing many words on sight, quickly and accurately. Children must be able to develop a catalogue of sight words needed for reading and spelling.
Fluency
A fluent child can read aloud with accuracy and good understanding. A child’s inability to decode words quickly and correctly when reading aloud affects the child’s comprehension of the overall context. | |
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| Spelling
For many children, spelling is a formidable task. While phonemic awareness helps, it is not always the answer. Sometimes correct spelling has to come from memory. Multi-sensory techniques, exercising both the auditory and visual systems, are used to help poor spellers. | |
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Symptoms of Reading Problems |
- Difficulty reading single words in isolation
- Difficulty accurately decoding nonsense or unfamiliar words
- Slow, inaccurate or labored oral reading
- Difficulty with learning to spell
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Clues to Reading Problems in Early Childhood
Adapted from Sally Shaywitz Overcoming Dyslexia (2004) |
The preschool years:
Kindergarten and first grade:
- Failure to understand that words come apart; for example, the batboy can be pulled apart into bat and boy and later on, that the word bat can be broken down still further and sounded out as: “b?“aaa?“t?lt;/SPAN>
- Inability to learn to associate letters with sounds, such as being unable to connect the letter b with the “b?sound
- Reading errors that show no connection to the sounds of the letters; for example, the word big is read as goat
- The inability to read common one-syllable words or to sound out even the simplest of words, such as mat, cat, hop, nap
- Complaints about how hard reading is, or running and hiding when it is time to read
- A history of reading problems in parents or siblings
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| Other Reading Problems - Dyslexia |
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As defined by the International Dyslexic Association and used by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development:
Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurological in origin.
It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction. Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede growth of vocabulary and background knowledge.
Studies show that individuals with dyslexia process information in a different area of the brain than do non-dyslexics.
Many people who are dyslexic are of average to above average intelligence.
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