For some children, academic learning can be viewed in such a way - a collection of seemingly random pieces of information that do not form a coherent whole, no matter how hard they may try. But when we teach the young child to view and manipulate these pieces in a different way, they slowly come into focus, enabling the child to construct meaningful patterns. Gradually, they are able to see the whole picture in what was previously no more than a collection of random and unconnected parts.
One size does not fit all!
Childscope Tutoring offers support to young children experiencing difficulty acquiring the literacy skills they need to be successful in school. Before their first tutoring session, each child is taken through a fun but rigorous screening process to determine their unique strengths and weaknesses across a range of skill areas including:
- phonological awareness - their grasp of syllables and rhymes
- phonemic awareness - their knowledge of the alphabetic code and its corresponding sounds; their ability to isolate, blend and segment sounds within words; their ability to manipulate sounds within words
- morphological awareness - their knowledge of the meaning elements used to create words: bases, prefixes and suffixes
- reading - their ability to decode printed text and read with fluency
- writing - their ability to encode sounds and morphemes accurately into written words
A program tailored to your child's needs
By carefully assessing each child's strengths and weaknesses across a broad range of sub-skills, I am able to plan a program tailored to your child's specific needs. Families are provided with a full report detailing their child's performance during the screen and outlining the key focus areas for intervention.
The Childscope approach is first and foremost to be responsive to the child's needs. Unlike some services, that plan their curriculum for an entire term, I prefer to plan no more than a fortnight ahead in order to maintain flexibility and enable me to respond immediately to the student's performance. A planned lesson may be abandoned in order to address a gap in the child's understanding that arises in the course of the lesson, or to respond to a child's question regarding a particular spelling pattern or convention.
The sessions themselves are hands-on and seek to maximise the child's opportunity to apply what they are learning in a variety of ways. I aim to make learning a collaborative process, with the content delivered in such a way that every child can experience success and feel a sense of achievement by articulating what they have learned. By encouraging children to move beyond simply answering questions or being "correct", to having them explain how they made a particular spelling decision and how they know they are correct (or why a different possible spelling wasn't used), children are able to internalise spelling rules and transfer skills and concepts to their long term memory.
Building Word Scientists
By the time most children reach me, they have already been struggling for a considerable period of time, and have often already received several months (and sometimes years) of intervention to little or no effect. Many children diagnosed with Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD's) in literacy, such as dyslexia, have already decided that the English orthography system makes no sense and is beyond them, so taking these students through the various sound-spelling correspondences yet again is unlikely to make much difference beyond further diminishing their view of themselves as capable learners. The problem lies in the fact that most students are only taught one spelling strategy - sound it out - and this fails for the vast majority of words in the English language. Why? Because contrary to what children are taught at school, English orthography (the way we write it) is not purely phonetic. English is a morphophonemic language, meaning its orthography was designed to represent both the sound AND the meaning of a word.
And this is the Childscope difference. Utilising an approach grounded in Structured Word Inquiry, I encourage the students to investigate the structure and meaning of words in order to unlock the mystery behind their spelling; in effect, to become word scientists. Central to this is building the students' understanding of morphology - the units of meaning we use to build words of increasing complexity. I am training students to look at words in a different way so that they can finally understand why they are spelled the way they are, effectively eliminating the need for them to memorise words letter by letter. And by teaching students to investigate words and their spelling through the lens of morphology, we equip them with the skills necessary to become independent spellers capable of exploring any word they ecounter, not just those they have been taught.
Parents - the child's first teacher
Intervention, in the form of tutoring, may be an essential ingredient in helping struggling children build the skills necessary for success at school, but the most important one is you! Tutoring is a team effort! Your active involvement in your child's intervention program not only provides them additional opportunities to practice vital skills, it communicates to your child that learning is important and you are there to support them every step of the way. When learning to read and spell, repeated exposure to the target letters and sounds (and particularly repeated opportunity to write them) is the glue that locks learning into long term memory. After each session you will be provided with a range of simple and fun follow up activities to do at home with your child to help learning stick that much better. And I am always on hand to answer questions and offer support when you need it.