Reading

At Family Tree, our educational programming is highly individualized and focuses on how processing affects learning. To create a plan to address your child’s challenges, we start with a full developmental profile and identify all factors that are involved with your child’s learning difference.  We avoid general terms such as “attention problem” or “hard time learning” and instead identify why your child has challenges and tailor a program to help your child be empowered during his or her school years.

We look at visual and auditory development as well as foundational components of attention, regulation and focus.  Our occupational therapists use an eye gaze software program to objectively determine if there are ocular-motor concerns challenges impacting learning.  They can help tailor modifications to the environment and activity, provide sensory regulation strategies, as well as address any underlying postural or visual-motor concerns.  These “bottom-up” strategies help create a solid foundation so our more “top-down” strategies can be understood and easily used.

Our speech and language pathologists can help break down the task of reading, determining what factors might be negatively impacting learning.  These can include auditory processing, the rules of phonics and spelling, the ability to pick out salient information and follow directions, visualize what was read to facilitate memory and comprehension, expressive language organization and more.  We do not merely “assist” or “supervise” your child during homework, but rather provide actual strategies that are specific to unique learning styles.

Listen to our podcast as Stacy and Terri break down the skills to create a reader!