Educational Therapy Services for Families

For all families, I begin by meeting with the student and parent(s) to decide if we are a good fit. Next I review all documents available and administer educational assessments to identify our starting point.  If available, I meet with the student’s teacher to learn what is observed in the classroom.  I use all of this information to identify gaps in learning, student strengths and struggles, and priorities for setting goals.  Throughout our Educational Therapy sessions, I use formal and informal assessment methods to document the student’s progress. Our full educational therapy services outline for families a roadmap to academic success.

For students, I structure our sessions to research-proven methods and learning techniques combined with content that is interesting and appropriate to the student’s skill level.  I encourage students to use their unique strengths to overcome or work around their areas of struggle.  We end each session with time to reflect on what we did, how we did it and what we learned that can improve the student’s approach to learning.

For parents, I consult about the student, the school process and the family’s rights and responsibilities.  I have been through this as a parent.  I can walk parents through the process, help them understand reports and jargon, recommend approaches to use with the student and help parents partner with schools.  I bring a sensitivity and compassion to this that comes from having walked in shoes like the parents’.

Here are some examples of how I have worked with students:

• A 2^nd grader who was not producing any work at school, and was reading at the kindergarten level. This student struggled with self-regulating.  I helped the family with school selection and used Orton Gillingham multisensory reading methods to remediate his dyslexia.  As we worked, I partnered with his teacher to explain the “unwritten rules” of school to the student and develop strategies for him to self-regulate at school.

• A 7^th grader who struggled with writing assignments. He had depth of knowledge on his subjects, but did not appear able to differentiate the important points from the less important ones (saliency).  As a result, he struggled to figure out what to write.  We developed a two-pronged plan, working directly on writing skills –  sentence and paragraph structure and analysis skills,  while also addressing  executive skills to better organize his writing, get started (task initiation) and follow-through to finish on time (sustain attention and time management).

• A 4^th grader struggling with math who perplexed his teacher and parents. He had mastered the math facts for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and could successfully solve math equations for all four operations.  Word problems were his downfall.  He could not identify what operation to use for problems because he did not understand the concepts behind each operation.  We started out working with physical objects to build a three-dimensional model of each word problem and then acted it out.  After that we switched to the mathematics of the problem and discuss what we were doing and why.

• A middle school student who was struggling with note-taking and test preparation. After an assessment demonstrated that he was a very visual learner, he learned a note- taking method that captured main ideas and details in a visual pattern.  He then learned how to use those notes to enhance his recall of structure and details while studying for and taking tests.

• A bilingual 2^nd grade student who had been diagnosed with dyslexia. A language sample analysis identified difficulties understanding the use of verb tenses in English.  I added lessons on English verb structure to the reading remediation work we did to fill this gap.

Methods and programs I use for my Educational Therapy Services:

Reading:  Orton Gillingham based reading remediation including the IMSE and Wilson Reading systems.  Notice and Note Fiction and Non Fiction (Beers and Probst) methods for reading comprehension.

Math:  Making Math Real (Berg) and Math U See (Demme)

Writing:  Writing Skills (Hanbury King), 6+1 Traits of Writing (Culham), Writing with Ease and Writing with Skill (Bauer)

Executive Function and Social Skills:  Social Thinking (Garcia Winner), Zones of Regulation (Kuypers), Brain Talk Therapy (Lindemuth and Bogen), Seeing My Time (Sklar), Smart But Scattered (Dawson and Guare)

©2021 Tyler Sack