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How can Smarties Private Tutoring help my child's English skills?


Smarties Private Tutoring provides support for students finding challenges with all English concepts including phonemic awareness and phoneme/ grapheme correspondence for early reading skills. Explicit phonological and decoding instruction along with vocabulary knowledge is provided for reading accuracy, fluency and comprehension as well as spelling and grammar skills, written narrative and persuasive text features and multisensory handwriting skills. All instruction includes decodable books for reading and decodable passages for encoding.
Using the Orton-Gillingham Approach, each session will include one-on-one teacher-student instruction in an explicit multisensory, structured and sequential method to teach reading, writing and spelling.

WHAT IS THE ORTON-GILLINGHAM APPROACH TO ENGLISH?


The Orton-Gillingham Approach was originally designed for students with dyslexia. It is a powerful learning tool and highly recommended to help any student who finds reading or spelling challenging. This multisensory approach uses multiple pathways, such as explicit spelling patterns and grammar skills to help children learn and master the connections between sounds and letters.

Orton-Gillingham provides activities which help students make connections between sounds and letters in our English language and apply these generalisations to help their reading (decoding) and spelling (encoding). Students sequentially move from the simple concepts of language to more complex concepts, reviewing their previously learnt information at the beginning of each new session. As language skills are mastered, new skills are introduced.

Learn

Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. This skill is taught in a step-by-step approach and developed as part of the progression of reading (decoding) and spelling (encoding). Students work through a sequence of phonemes, rules and patterns, phonetically irregular sight words, syllabication knowledge.

Grow

Each language skill is mastered before moving on to the next. Students’ progress is monitored during sessions, so that new skills are introduced and targeted to the area of need. Students continue to learn new spelling patterns, then apply these learned skills to become fluid readers, accurate spellers and creative writers.

Thrive

Decodable texts are specifically written for beginning readers as they are developing their blending and segmenting skills and their knowledge of the alphabetic code. They contain a small amount of phonetically irregular words. These books increase in complexity as the student learns more of the phonetic code. This improves reading accuracy and fluency and boosts confidence with reading skills.