Our Services

If you have just returned home from a school meeting or a feedback session following a psycho-educational evaluation of your child and you feel overwhelmed by the information you have received or you just don’t know what to do next, then you have come to the right place. Yael Swerdlow and her associates have many years experience working with children and their families on all aspects of their educational needs. Have you heard terms like “we suspect that … has some reading problems or dyslexia, language or auditory processing issues, difficulty getting their thoughts down in writing, receptive or expressive language problems, reads well – but doesn’t comprehend what he/she is reading…” or do you see your child put in hours of work, and still fail or not do well in the test? ” … sits and stares at his paper and she just does not get started, no matter what I say she just cannot get started.” ” The words just fall out of his mouth. He tries so hard not to interrupt or upset the other kids, but somehow the words just spill out.”

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Study Skills / Organizational Skills

Processing Skills

Reading

We offer an eclectic approach when working with students on their reading difficulties. All tutors are familiar with a variety of reading strategies including Orton Gillingham, the Lindamood-Bell LiPS program, and many other strategies that Yael Swerdlow and her associates have developed during their many years of working in this area. All the strategies we use include a multi-sensory approach to help students with their decoding difficulties, and at the same time, we also ensure that we not only transfer these skills to reading of decodable texts, but also to reading “everday” books appropriate to their age and grade level and that help develop comprehension skills at the same time. This supports our overriding philosophy that Reading without meaning is not reading.

Before one is able to teach students to read there are a number of underlying skills they first need to master. These include visual and auditory processing skills, the latter often being referred to as phonological processing skills. In addition they need to have basic language skills and a developed vocabulary. Once this foundation is established, we are able to focus more on teaching decoding (breaking words down into their individual sounds) and blending (joining the sounds into meaningful words) words, build up to sentences, paragraphs and stories which then add the next critical dimension, comprehension.

“Putting your child in the hands of Yael is the best investment you can make for your daughter or son’s future”

Parents of an 8 year old dyslexic student

Please contact us anytime! We look forward to hearing from you.

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Oral and Written Language

When working on expressive language, be it oral or written, we pay particular attention to helping students develop their vocabulary, and increase their use of more sophisticated words that express specific ideas and attributes. We also stress the importance of organizing their thoughts before “blurting out” the first thing that comes to mind. When doing a written piece, we teach them to use graphic organizers before they get started. These help them get their thoughts down first, then organize them into a coherent format, and only then do they begin the writing process.

In addition we work on:

Improving their structure and use of language by working on sentence structure, types of sentences, and use of specific language in different contexts.
Using visualization symbols to expand their ideas and add details to what they are saying or writing.
Experiencing different kinds of writing – narrative, expository, persuasive, and compare contrast
Using the Five Step Writing Process – brainstorm, rough draft, review, edit, publish

Math

We offer a full range of math services from K through 12 which ensure that our students have a full understanding of the concept being taught, not just the process. For the younger students we first work with manipulatives, then we transfer to drawings, and when they are ready they work without any of these supports. We focus on the mechanics of math, the concepts and language of math, mathematical reasoning and problem solving.
All of our math tutors are familiar with the Common Core Standards and the methodologies used in the lower grades. These strategies, although different from the way most adults learned math when they were in school, are aimed at teaching the students a deep understanding of the concepts they are learning, and it is exciting to see how these little folk are manipulating numbers and the world of math with much better understanding of what they are doing. While we support the common core strategies, we also teach the “traditional” ways as the students are required to know these ways as they move up in grade level (By 5th grade moving into middle school). We have one math tutor whose sole focus is high school math and she coaches students through Pre-Algebra, Algebra I and II, Geometry, Pre-Calculus and Calculus. In addition she does coaching for the ACT and SAT exams.

Study Skills/Organizational Skills

Before we begin working on the actual skills we work to “demystify” each student about what it is that is making studying challenging. We work together with the students to identify their learning styles (visual, auditory or kinetic – hands on) and what strengths they have to help them with these skills (verbal, analytical, visual – artistic etc.)

Once we have established this information and self-awareness, we continue to work on 5 additional components of what we need to study successfully:

Motivation
Organization of time, space and materials
active reading and listening
note taking
memorization and test-taking strategies

Executive Functioning Skills

The term Executive functioning refers to how we manage ourselves and our resources to reach our goals. This term or weakness with Executive functioning is something that we encounter more often than in the past. Clearly there is greater awareness that not every child only has ADD or ADHD, but there are many other complex skills that work together to make a child successful. Many people have the built in ability to accomplish goals and meet the daily challenges they face through the use of higher cognitive functions. These cognitive functions enable them to do what they are required to do by focusing on what tasks they need to attend to or choose to do, and to problem solve how to accomplish them.

These skills include:

impulse control
cognitive flexibility
initiation of task
organization
working memory
self monitoring

Processing Skills

Before one is able to teach a student to read, write or do math, there are a number of underlying skills they first need to master. These include visual and auditory processing skills,or otherwise referred to as phonological processing skills. In addition they need to have basic language skills and a developed vocabulary. Once this foundation is established, we are able to focus on teaching them to read, write and do math. Click on each tab to get more information about the particular processing skill.

Visual Processing Skills

Efficient visual processing skills are fundamental to becoming an efficient reader, speller and math student. They are often referred to as the meta-cognitive skills, the underlying skills needed to build the foundation from which a child learns to read, write and do math.

Discrimination – refers the student’s ability to match items that are the same, and therefore to determine whether things are the same or different. This skill is essential to a child being able to recognize that a “b” and a “d” are different.
Constancy – is the ability to see a b as a b wherever it stands on the page, and that if it changes direction for example it faces the left instead of the right, it becomes a “d”, or if it flips upwards, it becomes a “p”
Sequencing –refers to the ability to put things in the correct order. This could be the sequencing of pictures to retell a story you have just listened to, or the ability to sequence letters correctly in a word ex. when referring to the item we bathe in, we would use the letters t, b and u in the sequence tub and not but, another meaningful word that uses the same letters.

Analysis and synthesis – analysis is the breaking down of a picture or word into its component parts, and synthesis is the ability to put it together again into a meaningful unit. Ex. a triangle is made of three sides, and when given three sides, can you put them together to form a triangle?

Figure ground – the ability to identify a letter or picture in the foreground when it is hidden among other things in the background. This can be at a picture level – find the monkey hidden in the tree or a word level find the letter t in all the words on the page

We use a number of software programs to develop these skills as well as many activities we have developed ourselves. Most recently, Yael Swerdlow has been using a visual processing software program to develop visual memory, visual analysis and synthesis skills, planning and organization skills that she has found to be very beneficial to students with weak visual processing difficulties as well as those with poor visual memory and executive functioning skills.

Auditory Processing Skills

Efficient visual processing skills are fundamental to becoming an efficient reader, speller and math student. They are often referred to as the meta-cognitive skills, the underlying skills needed to build the foundation from which a child learns to read, write and do math.

Discrimination – refers the student’s ability to match items that are the same, and therefore to determine whether things are the same or different. This skill is essential to a child being able to recognize that a “b” and a “d” are different.
Constancy – is the ability to see a b as a b wherever it stands on the page, and that if it changes direction for example it faces the left instead of the right, it becomes a “d”, or if it flips upwards, it becomes a “p”
Sequencing –refers to the ability to put things in the correct order. This could be the sequencing of pictures to retell a story you have just listened to, or the ability to sequence letters correctly in a word ex. when referring to the item we bathe in, we would use the letters t, b and u in the sequence tub and not but, another meaningful word that uses the same letters.

Analysis and synthesis – analysis is the breaking down of a picture or word into its component parts, and synthesis is the ability to put it together again into a meaningful unit. Ex. a triangle is made of three sides, and when given three sides, can you put them together to form a triangle?

Figure ground – the ability to identify a letter or picture in the foreground when it is hidden among other things in the background. This can be at a picture level – find the monkey hidden in the tree or a word level find the letter t in all the words on the page

We use a number of software programs to develop these skills as well as many activities we have developed ourselves. Most recently, Yael Swerdlow has been using a visual processing software program to develop visual memory, visual analysis and synthesis skills, planning and organization skills that she has found to be very beneficial to students with weak visual processing difficulties as well as those with poor visual memory and executive functioning skills.

Language Processing

Language processing is often seen as the same thing as auditory processing, but i and others feel that language processing refers to the language component only i.e. that aspect that deals with meaning as opposed to isolated sounds and words.

There are many signs of language processing issues that include:

having difficulty making sense of spoken language
- the child may understand single words, but as the sentences increase in length, they have difficulty understanding. This may be somewhat confusing leaving you feeling like sometimes they get it, and other times they don’t. Often people conclude it is an attention issue, or the child is just not trying hard enough.
- if the information is familiar to the child, and they have some experience with it, they are able ot process the information, but if there is no familiarity and there are few clues, the child will not be able to understand it. This can cause frustration.
poor retrieval skills
- hard time labeling objects or recognizing labels
- hard time pulling the right words needed to express a thought verbally word is on “the tip of my tongue”.
- Can even describe the object or draw it, but cannot get the word
weak comprehension skills
weak written work
difficulty understanding abstract language like idioms and jokes
uses non-descriptive words – tells a story with lots of ideas but uses “thing” and “like this” and other non-descriptive words that in the end, they have spoken a lot, but have not conveyed what is in their head, and the listener has no clue what they are saying or talking about.

Yael Swerdlow and some of her associates have also recently been trained to implement the iLs Integrated Listening System Program. iLs trains the brain to process sensory, cognitive and emotional information more effectively. The program is designed to improve sensory-motor function, attention and processing, and language functioning thus allowing the student to be more available for learning effectively.

Home Schooling

Many students who are homeschooled have some sort of learning difficulty. It is hard for a parent to address these needs, so we have been asked many times in the past to work with students who are being home schooled on either their language arts, and or math curriculum depending where the student’s difficulties lie. We are not associated with one particular home school program, but we are happy to support the individual student’s program as well as supplement it with additional material to remediate their learning challenges.This service has been said to be very helpful to the parents who have little knowledge how to help their child overcome these learning challenges.