What Makes Us Special
One-on-one… So your child gets the attention he or she deserves!
We are dedicated to improving the lives of children, and our strength is doing it one child at a time. Your child will always work one-on-one with the same learning specialist to promote continuity, rapport, and maximum effort from your child.
Individualized… No two children’s sessions look alike!
We prepare your child’s individualized learning plan based on our initial evaluation, your valuable input, and other school or professional information you provide. This focuses the session time directly on your child’s specific needs to ensure meaningful impact at a pace that’s best for your child.
Cognitive Learning Skills… Essential for all learning!
Many tutoring companies focus on school homework help, but we believe getting to the root of learning challenges by strengthening underlying cognitive learning skills is the key. These crucial processing skills are needed for taking in, analyzing, and remembering information efficiently. Without them, learning can be time-consuming, laborious, and frustrating. Efficient cognitive learning skills are needed for reading, listening, comprehending, remembering, prioritizing, planning, and problem solving.
In session, our learning specialist works to develop your childs’ cognitive skills which are below age/grade level and related to the targeted curriculum area(s).
These may include:
Visual Skills: Tracking, processing speed, discrimination, spatial, memory, attention and focus
Auditory Skills: memory, processing, attention and focus, and phonemic awareness
Conceptual Skills: logic & problem solving, seeing & applying patterns, and nonverbal reasoning & analogies
Language Processing Skills: vocabulary, expressive & receptive language processing, and organizing written & verbal information for retrieval
Humans learn through adaptation. Kids start off in life with the most basic processing skills and gradually work their way up to more complex skills by applying current skills to new ones. This is the cognitive process. Since each new skill learned builds upon a lower one, any deficient skills will affect future skills. Research has shown that these complex skills are more learned than innate and have potential to improve with practice. How exciting for your child to transfer these skills to academic tasks and gain a sense of control over his or her performance!
It’s also exciting for us because this is where our passion and expertise comes into play. We can help a child who does not have the needed skills to read a paragraph, grasp a math concept, or recall the main idea of a story. We can provide a child with specialized strategies to gather the information, analyze it, and communicate it. We can make a child consciously aware of the best way to listen, visualize, focus, attend, and remember. As these new skills become automatic, the old, counter-productive behaviors will be phased out, and attitudes toward learning improve!
For a wonderful visual analogy to describe the cognitive process and how cognitive skills affect learning, click here.
Programs… Effective and Research-based!
At Specialty Tutoring we work with kids who may learn differently, using programs designed for
- Dyslexia & Dyscalculia
- Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD)
- Auditory & Language Processing Disorders
A combination of programs and practice materials for phonemic awareness and fluency are used to provide strategies for decoding and spelling.
Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program for Reading, Spelling, and Speech (LiPS)**
The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS®) Program® develops phoneme awareness. Children learn to recognize how their mouths produce the sounds of language. This kinesthetic feedback enables them to verify sounds within words and to become self-correcting in reading and spelling.
- Employs a multi-sensory approach that includes manipulating sounds with blocks to develop phonological awareness
- Develops word recognition & fluency through a systematic phonetic approach for decoding isolated sounds and simple, complex, and multi-syllable words
- Uses nonsense words to develop phonics skills
Seeing Stars: Symbol Imagery for Phonemic Awareness, Sight Words, and Spelling**
The Seeing Stars® program develops symbol imagery, which is the ability to visualize sounds and letters in words. Children move through a series of steps to develop the imagery-language connection for competency in written language.
- Improves phonetic spelling through a systematic approach for recognizing orthographic patterns in simple, complex, and multi-syllable words
- Teaches visualization techniques for improving spelling and reading of phonetic words
- Develops word recognition and fluency with ordered sight word lists
Read Naturally
The Read Naturally program develops fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension through a system of modeling, repeated reading, and recording of progress to provide feedback that motivates the child. When used to target reading fluency, the program:
- Develops accuracy, rate, and inflection in oral reading
- Expands sight vocabulary
- Strengthens writing and spelling by providing practice with written response to reading
Supplemental resources, including Orton-Gillingham-based Explode the Code, Beyond the Code, and Morgan Dynamics are used as practice materials.
Programs and practice materials designed to improve visualization techniques, vocabulary, and higher order thinking skills are used to facilitate a deeper understanding of reading material.
Visualizing and Verbalizing for Language Comprehension and Thinking (V/V)**
The Visualizing and Verbalizing® (V/V®) program develops concept imagery for both oral and written language. Children learn to create a mental image and integrate that imagery with language as a basis for comprehension and thinking.
- Increases retention of material through structured visualization practice while reading
- Introduces and expands academic vocabulary
- Employs a Socratic, choice/contrast questioning technique so children can learn how to gather evidence from complex text for reading, writing, and speaking using Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS):
- Determining the main idea
- Locating and remembering facts
- Making inferences and drawing conclusions
- Predicting and extending
- Develops comprehension in a variety of modes, such as listening and oral and silent reading
- Strengthens oral and written language expression
- Enhances ability to follow directions
Read Naturally
The Read Naturally program develops fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension through a system of modeling, repeated reading, and recording of progress to provide feedback that motivates the child. When used to target reading comprehension, the program:
- Strengthens ability to make predictions about a passage before reading
- Increases vocabulary
- Hones visualization skills while reading
- Develops summarization skills, both orally and written
- Includes comprehension practice in various modes, such as multiple-choice, short answer, and open-ended response
Additional resources, including LinguiSystems, IEW, and Reasoning&Reading, are used as supplemental practice materials.
A combination of programs and practice materials designed to provide style and structure to pieces of writing, as well as practice applying written conventions.
Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) provides the tools that students need to write well, organize ideas, and express themselves eloquently and persuasively.
- Emphasizes the identification of key information and summarizing
- Develops stylistic technique through the use of quality vocabulary and varied sentence structure
- Enhances comprehension of fiction and non-fiction
- Provides structure for a variety of writing applications, including prompts, stories, reports, and essays
- Builds confidence and independence in writing
Standardized Written Conventions Instruction includes effective practice materials to target grade-appropriate mechanics of writing.
- Builds knowledge of capitalization and punctuation rules, and editing practice
- Develops grammar skills with parts of speech, sentence structure, and language fundamentals..
We target skill gaps that may have occurred along the way in a child’s math learning. Strategies for memorization of math facts and hands-on, interactive methods are applied to real-life situations.
On Cloud Nine Math**
The On Cloud Nine® program stimulates the ability to visualize concepts and numerals and integrate that imagery with language to improve math processes.
- Builds a solid foundation in number sense and computation
- Stimulates the creation of visual images and use of language to guide thinking to become independent and self-correcting
- Emphasizes the use of manipulatives (hands-on math)
- Moves from concrete learning (see and feel it) to abstract learning (paper/pencil)
- Provides a step-by-step method for solving story problems
- Develops memorization of math facts and estimation skills
Math Mammoth
The Math Mammoth program is a complete and comprehensive curriculum that correlates well with the Indiana Academic Standards for Math. Each grade level text highlights clear and concise explanations for each new skill presented and provides opportunities for practice.
- Corresponds with Specialty Tutoring’s Foundational Math Skills Assessment to target skill gaps at prior and current grade levels
- Includes practice in all major math content areas, including Number Sense, Computation, Algebraic Thinking, Geometry, Measurement, Data Analysis and Statistics
- Prioritizes foundational skills of number sense, computation, and problem solving
Many additional resources, including Touch Math and Rosner’s SASP, are used as needed.
[/intense_collapse
**Specialty Tutoring is not affiliated with, certified, endorsed, licensed, monitored or sponsored by the Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes Corporation.
Learning Specialists… Dedicated and trained to help your child succeed!
We have an invested team of caring Learning Specialists, who
- are college degreed and have prior experience motivating & instructing children
- receive extensive initial and ongoing training and professional development
- are trained to create targeted & individualized lesson plans
- form a positive working relationship with the child and the family
Interactive & Efficient Methods… To engage and motivate!
Our goal is to make significant improvements in a child’s learning skills through a series of individualized tasks that make repetitive demands on a deficient skill, and progressively increase in difficulty. New skills are practiced and reinforced in a variety of sensory modalities to produce habitual and automatic skill mastery and a high level of retention.
Kids are more likely to adopt a positive attitude about learning if they are having fun while doing it! We incorporate fun, interactive activities that don’t look or feel like “work” in order to keep kids energized and engaged.
We realize that kids learn at different paces, therefore we pace our skill progression based on each child’s individual abilities. Sequenced activities begin at a comfortable level and gradually increase in difficulty to challenge the child. Positive feedback is given for correct responses, and questioning is used to immediately modify incorrect thinking. Points are given for work in the session and at home, which accumulate to earn small rewards.
Time is of the essence with our kids! We try to have a “sense of urgency” with regard to efficient use of tutoring time in order to make the most amount of progress in the shortest amount of time, using activities that target more than one skill gap at a time. By producing rapid and recognizable changes, a child SEES and FEELS the improvement, and motivation and self-confidence soar.
Parent Involvement… Learn how to help your child at home!
You are your child’s biggest ally and advocate! We strive to involve parents in all that we do. This is cost-effective and helps transfer learned skills to the child’s everyday activities. Parents come in at the end of each session so questions can be answered and progress discussed. Practice work is sent home between tutoring sessions to reinforce skills. Parents may sign a release form to open the door of communication with the child’s teacher. We want the child to feel a sense of security, knowing that we are all a team in this together!
Improved Self-Esteem… Serious learning with a smile!
Many of our kids come to us feeling defeated. They’ve lost their motivation to try since so very often it ends in frustration. Learning, for them, has become a source of stress.
Our passion is giving kids opportunities for success by helping them figure out how to learn.
Each child leaves us with a tailored set of tools. It’s NOT a one size fits all kind of toolbox. Contained in this toolbox are tools and strategies to help reduce fear of failure and dependency on others and increase willingness to take on challenging tasks. Armed with these tools, kids gain a renewed belief in themselves and discover it’s actually fun and exciting to learn. This changed attitude can transfer into all aspects of their lives. And THAT’S something to smile about!!
