Does your child struggle to sound out words or read fluently? Do they become easily frustrated and avoid reading? Do they have trouble comprehending material or making inferences from what they read? If any of these apply to your child, they may benefit from reading tutoring. Reading tutoring can help your child in the following ways:
Build reading comprehension skills
Reading comprehension plays a role in nearly all aspects of school, including language arts, social studies, science, and math word problem solving. Reading tutoring can help your child develop this critical skill using research-based techniques. For example, a reading tutor might teach your child a tri-colored highlighting strategy, as follows: when we read, there are three elements we should look for - the topic, main idea, and important details. Students learn that the topic is 1, 2, or 3 words describing the passage. They learn to highlight the topic in blue. The main idea is what the author is saying about the topic, and they highlight the topic in green. Finally, the important details are salient pieces of information describing the main idea, and they highlight the main idea in green. To apply this strategy, students should read various passages and highlight the topic in blue, main idea in green, and important details in yellow. Their reading tutor can then teach them to make inferences and write summaries about the information they read in the passage. Additionally, reading tutoring can help your child learn to visualize the information they read, another key component of comprehension.
Decoding
Reading tutoring can help your child develop stronger decoding skills, or the ability to accurately sound out words when reading. Specifically, using Orton Gillingham tutoring, your child can learn to decode words containing consonant-vowel-consonant patterns, blends, consonant digraphs, vowel digraphs, silent e patterns, multi-syllabic words, prefixes, suffixes, and roots. They can also learn spelling rules as part of the Orton Gillingham tutoring to further develop their spelling skills. This research-based, multi-sensory approach, which integrates tools such as colored sand, audio-visual flash cards, white boards, and magnetic tiles, can help your child develop much stronger decoding and spelling skills.
Reading fluency
Reading tutoring can also help your child develop stronger reading fluency skills. One strategy your child’s reading tutor may integrate is a choral reading technique to help them develop their fluency skills. With this technique, your child’s reading tutor would select a passage slightly below their reading level and perform the following steps:
The student reads the passage out loud to the reading tutor as an initial read.
The reading tutor reads the same passage aloud to the student to model good fluency.
The student reads the same passage aloud with the reading tutor, trying to keep up with their fluency.
The student reads the same passage aloud one more time, and the reading tutor praises them with the improvement in their fluency.
Reading tutoring can help your child develop much stronger reading skills, including comprehension, decoding, and fluency - all key components of school success.
