Ardent Tutoring

16/10/2024

Are you interested in January intensive tutoring?

3 zoom sessions a week for 3 weeks leading up to school.

An individualised program for your child focussing on numeracy or literacy skills.
Message me if you’d like more information.

29/04/2024

https://pld-literacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/PRIMARY-READING-PLEDGE_August2020Final.pdf

What literacy program does your school use? Is it researched and proven to work??

27/03/2024

This is a great Australian podcast- for parents and teachers! Check it out.

Listen to Dyscastia on Spotify. A podcast for parents and educators on the best way to support kids living with learning difficulties such as dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia. Do you, your partner, your child, a relative or a student of grapple with an identified (or suspected) Specific Learning...

04/03/2024

This website is awesome.
Great advice for parents, information for teachers and some free professional development.

Check it out to learn about reading instruction for your child.

Five From Five aims to improve literacy levels by ensuring all children receive effective, evidence-based reading instruction.

20/02/2024

What is a decodable book? Check out the first of the SPELD NSW Reading Decodable Book series to find out more. 📘📖

The series can be found on SPELD NSW YouTube and addresses how best to select a decodable book, how to read a decodable book with a student, how to support a student when they make an error, and how to read decodable books for fluency practice.

These videos are great for both teachers and parents working with students who are learning to read.

Check them out today!

https://youtu.be/-bhfOWaLZhs?si=SxCU9asHHOegLJPi

10/02/2024

06/02/2024

A quick spelling practise game- write the sounds on masking tape on the floor- sound out the word jumping from sound to sound.
How many words can you make with these sounds (using this spelling choice)?

F, p, i, o, r, c, k, ar, a, e, sh, ll

I hardly notice the mismatched living space tiles our house came with anymore!

The spelling words in question were shark, she, shell, ash, crash, shop and fish.

01/02/2024

Decodable Readers- Does your child’s school use them?

The books schools send home for children to practice reading during the week SHOULD be easy! The purpose should be to practice the skills learnt at school. Decodable readers are short books that a child can decode.

What does that mean? Decoding just means reading- written language is a code, translating it into spoken language is decoding. A child at the beginning has only just grasped a few letters.

So, a book about a cat on a mat in a hat etc. may seem boring or repetitive, but it is actually reinforcing the skills of reading that the child knows. Too often children grasp enough of the code to get by and guess the word based on the picture or what makes sense.

But what happens when there are no pictures? or the sentence isn't easily guessed by just looking at the first letter of each word? All of a sudden, they can't "read". It's because they weren't really decoding to begin with. They used a few decoding skills and a whole heap of guesses.

East Gippsland Libraries have one set of Decodable Readers- I hope they will expand their decodable resources as it makes reading more accessible for all.

27/01/2024

Is your child's school using multisensory instruction to teach your child?

What is proven to work is "multisensory structured language and literacy" or MSL. In short, this means that the best way to instruct children to learn to read, spell, write, speak and use language is through actually telling them the information.

Not just surrounding them with books and expecting them to learn to read. Not just reading to them often, and not just by telling them to write a sentence.

The skills need to be demonstrated. The facts need to be explained, the practice needs to include all their senses. The program needs to be step by step, clear and logical.

The photo is of my children covering the windows in shaving foam- they then wrote out spelling words, drew pictures and finally cleaned it off for a very sparkling window!

This activity was very fun- and not as messy as you'd think, but importantly it used visual, auditory (as they sounded out spelling words) and kinesthetic (touch/feeling) learning. (It did also smell and my 3 year old tasted it so almost every sense). As well as the oral language- the discussion around how to draw a picture to represent their individual spelling words, how the shaving foam felt and what finger techniques to use.

Win-win-win!

24/01/2024

Have you heard of SPELD?

SPELD Victoria’s purpose is to assist the estimated 5-10% of all Victorians with Specific Learning Difficulties to achieve their full learning potential.
(FYI- Specific Learning Difficulties are difficulties in a specific area of learning such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia or ADHD- these are not related to a person's intelligence).

AND they have an Infoline for information, advice and support 1800 051 533.

21/01/2024

What is “Phonemic Awareness”?

Phonemic awareness is a critical skill for reading and spelling. It is the identification and ability to manipulate speech sounds within a word.

It encompasses the ability to;

-blend sounds into a word- the sounds ‘c’ + ‘a’ + ‘t’ = cat (remember the purple two headed monster from sesame street?),

-segmenting sounds- cat can be separated out into ‘c’ + ‘a’ + ‘t’ and

-manipulating sounds- take the word cat, replace the sound ‘c’ with ‘b’ (or to put it in maths terms; cat – ‘c’ + ‘b’ = bat).

These skills are the first stepping stones to becoming literate, they are the foundation. Often children struggling to keep up in reading and writing and spelling at school are missing these foundation blocks.

18/01/2024

My 6 year old and I went for a date at Tambo Honey Bruthen. I told her she could have a spider if she could read all the flavours off the menu! Such concentration and persistence, got very confused at the word "lim-e" (still working on the split digraph i_e) but the smile when she realised she had read "raspberry" was gold. She ended up deciding on lemonade.
**I only asked her to do this because I knew she would be able to, she knew she was going to get a spider regardless of whether she read it or not.