Finally – A Tutoring Center that Understands My Child

Some kids have an amazing, but counter-productive, ability to mask or compensate for underlying difficulties. And for most kids, the strategies eventually stop being effective when the workload or difficulty out paces their compensatory strategies.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned at The Reading Clinic it is to not assume that a child has a particular skill because of their age or apparent ability. We have met kids and adults with dyslexia who appear to be reading fluently, but really have just memorized a lot of words. They come to us because reading is laborious and they have a hard time understanding what they read due to the effort they are putting into to recalling so many memorized words. We’ve also met “straight A” students, often times with ADHD, who have an exceptional ability to retain information from classroom lectures and read beautifully but cannot remember and/or understand a bit of what they’ve read. In math, some students are able to memorize how to solve problems, but never understand why those solutions work and can’t solve word problems. We also work with students who do not appear to comprehend what they read but actually do and just can’t explain themselves well enough, sometimes verbally and often in writing, to demonstrate how much they know. They do well on multiple choice and matching tests because they can recognize the answers.

Getting support for kids with strong compensatory strategies can be challenging because it is easy to miss the underlying issue. Kids may get increasingly frustrated because their classes or tutoring is not on target for what they need. Part of our expertise at The Reading Clinic is in making sure that our lessons are getting to the heart of an issue and that the method we are using will get results. It matters to us how they kids feel about their sessions because that is usually the first indicator whether or not we are on target. And often, what students need most is also what is most difficult for them so we take great care in making sure lessons are paced in a way to challenge, but not overwhelm them.

We offer assessments to help us pinpoint what foundational skills need to be strengthened. We also take into account parent and teacher feedback to make sure we are addressing the underlying difficulties. And, of course, we expect to see consistent progress with our students and monitor their performance in every session.