Assessment – Intervention Tutoring

When your student starts with me, I will assess them in the specific subject area.

Reading/spelling assessment is 5 parts (alphabet knowledge/letter writing, spelling, sight words, reading/comprehension and ability to manipulate sounds). It gives me a well- rounded view of where your student is by testing their alphabetic knowledge, encoding ability, decoding ability, visualizing and comprehension and phonological awareness.

Math assessment is a grade lower than where your student is currently. I do this because if your student is having trouble in the current grade there are probably weak points in the math in the grades before. I will go through the assessment with them and simply ask them if they could answer or at least tackle this question on an exam. If they answer back with a confident yes then I don’t put it on my list but, if they answer back with a maybe or no then it goes on my list as a topic to cover. Once the assessment is done I go through the topics and put them in an order that makes sense so that we can seamlessly go from topic to topic and it builds nicely.

Writing and grammar assessment is on the parts of speech, the kind of sentences and other grammatical topics. I will also have them write a small journal prompt so I can tell how they write.

Morphology assessment is on the origin of the most common Latin prefixes, Latin suffixes, Latin roots, Greek prefixes, Latin suffixes and Greek roots.

My methodology to spelling and reading
The methodology I use is called Orton-Gillingham mixed with a systematic phonics program called Recipe for Reading. Orton-Gillingham is the preferred methodology for Dyslexic students because it’s a multi-sensory approach. It focuses on learning individual sounds then learning the letters that make those sounds to spell words. I also teach the rules behind phonics so students can understand why we use that letter combination here and not something else. Our brains don’t store whole words, they store sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes) and we pull that from our long-term memory to spell.

My methodology to Math
When teaching math I feel that manipulatives and understanding the “why” is most important for truly “seeing” the math problem. With my elementary school students I use plastic chips, base 10 blocks, stackable plastic blocks, white boards and online games to help students “see” it. With my older students I will break down a practice problem in the subject we are going over with different colored makers so they can see how I did the problem. Middle school and high school math is usually much more involved so the colored markers help them see how I broke down a math problem or where I pulled the information from in a word problem.