My daughter is in third grade and was reading at a very low reading level. She has been working with Stacey since December 2021 and has improved immensely. Using the Orton-Gillingham approach, Stacey has taught my daughter to read with confidence and use the reading skills she has learned to decipher words and text that she would have never even attempted before. My daughter used to hate reading and now she actually enjoys it. She has even shown interest in buying books to read. That would have never happened before. Stacey has a gift to get kids to believe in themselves and my daughter actually looks forward to her reading sessions with her. Recently, I attended my daughter’s poetry event at school where she volunteered to read her poem to an entire audience of parents. I cried! I am so grateful we found her! She is the absolute best! Thank you, Stacey!!!
Reading Specialist/Orton Gillingham Trained Tutor
- 14 hires
- Based in Brooklyn, NY
- 28 years in business
- 1 employee
- Responds in about 4 hours
- Background checked
About Reading Specialist/Orton Gillingham Trained Tutor
**** Please note: *All sessions are online and I am presently fully booked other than: limited school hours (reach out for exact availability) Mondays starting between 3:10-3:30 Wednesday at 4:30 Sundays at 9. Unfortunately, I cannot add students to a waiting list at this time. *$120 is the base price for the first hour. Costs after the first hour are negotiable with firm commitment to regular sessions. Please do not be hesitant to ask if my fees are prohibitive for your family. ***** Also note: I am only accepting students in 3nd grade and above. The one exception to this is if your child has been formally diagnosed with dyslexia. In big part, this is because teachers with a lot less phonics training/experience than I have can usually address literacy issues in younger students effectively. I prefer to work with older students, as this requires a higher skill level and is an area I have increasingly focused on. I am the person you call after other phonics-based instruction has fallen short as I'm good at zeroing in on what went wrong the first time around. OG based methodology is outstanding but some kids do fall through the cracks. Also, in many cases, it takes up to third grade for families to identify the problem and learn what the solution is (in other words, explicit phonics instruction). I'm good at getting these particular kids reading without resorting to "baby-ish" seeming materials. I understand thatl first and second grade materials should never be used with older students even if they're reading at a first or second grade level. *** If you live in New York: I am an approved DOE SETSS provider in New York and can do this at the regular rate, but parents must attain explicit permission to do online through your CSE office (a process I can help with). If the case goes to hearing, I request the enhanced rate to enable me to hold room in my schedule while waiting for the p4 approval and to make up for the legal preparation time on my part. I wish you the best of luck. ******** Hi neighbors. My name is Stacey and I have worked with hundreds of struggling readers and writers since 1998. I am a New York State certified reading specialist with an undergraduate degree in Speech and Language Disorders. I am trained in the Orton Gillingham method (with over 100 hours of training and 25 hours of direct mentorship) and have over 28 years experience using it. However, I am also very creative, so many of the things I do with students are my own creations which evolved over the years and collaborations with other highly skilled OG based teachers. I use a lot of games to help the students build their skills in fun and effective ways. I do well with students who have a hard time focusing or have shown little progress with other tutors (even other OG trained tutors, as my many years of experience have helped me come up with solutions for all students). I also very much enjoy working with adults and teenagers with obvious gaps in their reading skills. My favorite areas of focus are working with students who have not found success with other teachers in terms of being stuck at the early stages of reading and those who have a lot of phonics related information from other tutors, but are not using it throughout the day, particularly with writing and spelling. Unfortunately, I cannot offer homework support. I was initially trained at The Kildonan School in Upstate, New York in 1998. I spent 3 years as a tutor and classroom teacher there. I also spent five summers working for their summer program, Camp Dunnabeck. In 2001, I moved to Brooklyn and began working at The Sterling School, another specialized school for highly intelligent but very dyslexic children. I was there for another 16 years. I have done a considerable amount of private tutoring over the years, mostly through The Children's School, PS 321, GSB (Global School Brooklyn) and Mary McDowell, but have seen children from many other schools as well. I work with struggling readers who just need a boost to catch up with their classmates, as well as severely dyslexic individuals. Over the years I have enjoyed increasingly becoming involved in advocating for my students in their schools. If you want the process to get a boost to make it more affordable (less time consuming with faster results) I work with parents or caregivers on easy to follow activities they can do at home. I can also suggest to parents computer programs that work well with what we are doing in our sessions, which can be worked on at home with less parent involvement. I have always known I wanted to be a teacher. From my earliest memories in school, I knew everything was harder for me. I wanted to become a teacher because I was very aware of the fact that some teachers made me feel terrible about myself, while others built me up regardless of my struggles (thank goodness, my life was peopled with more of the latter!). I wanted to be that kindness in the world. No one understood what was wrong with me, as dyslexia is just now being more recognized and I was functioning somewhat as a reader. I made it through school, but always felt three steps behind. This was because I was overly reliant I'm teacher lectures as I was not functioning enough as a reader to effectively gather more information from reading assignents. Right out of college, I did research to find out what had gone wrong in my own education, with my scattered skills despite being very intelligent, curious and hard working. I was trained in Orton Gillingham and in many ways remediated myself during that time. By the time I got to graduate school I was able to learn in a new and confident way. I had previously been diagnosed with ADD, but the bulk of my attention issues evaporated once I gained confidence in my academic skills. I am so happy to know how to help children learn early in their schooling to build their confidence and open them to the wonders of learning. I am able to supply additional references from schools and families in my care over the years. Thank you so much for advocating for your child.
Reviews
Stacey was recommended by multiple people in the field of special education for our 8 year old son who struggles with dyslexia. Six months later, we feel so fortunate to have secured a spot with her, and we've seen so much improvement with our son's reading. In her one-on-one sessions, Stacey provides exercises and plays games that directly address our son's reading struggles. She is incredibly efficient and packs a lot of instruction into their 30 minute sessions. We cannot recommend her enough!
Stacey is a first-rate reading specialist—I can’t say enough good things about her. Because she is dyslexic herself, she really gets what it’s like to be a kid who has a really tough time decoding words and sentences. The work that she does with kids feels like a true calling because of her own prior reading struggles. She worked one-on-one with my nine-year-old dyslexic son three days a week over the summer via Skype. Up until then my son had not been properly taught the rudiments of phonics. After faulty prior teaching methods that might be metaphorically akin to riding in an old jalopy, Stacey was a smooth riding Mercedes-Benz with all the bells and whistles! What was particularly special about Stacey is that she incorporated all sorts of games into the learning process, and was excellent at redirecting my highly distractible son. While she expected a lot of him in the concentrated amount of time that they worked together, she also had a lighthearted approach, peppering her lessons with sweet anecdotes that a child my son’s age appreciated. The work that she did with my son set him up for his first year at Mary McDowell Friends School. He received a great first progress report, and we owe a good part of that progress to the leg up Stacey provided in her teachings over the summer. Thank you so much for everything, Stacey!
Stacey is a star! Within minutes of meeting my daughter I realized this was the best help she'd ever received in reading. Stacey engaged my daughter with games, activities and won her respect with honest stories of her (Stacey's) own struggles with dyslexia.
Stacey is exactly who you want to help your kid get over their dyslexia hurdles - knowledgeable, engaging and warm.
Our experience with Stacey has been wonderful so far. My daughter has, not sure what to call it, low-grade dyslexia? But she is a very hard worker, and a well-behaved kid, so she always slipped through the cracks at school. I have suspected for a long time that she might have an issue—she is very smart, but struggled with learning to read, and had to work extremely hard just to get to reading slightly above grade level. And in 3rd grade, her spelling is still atrocious and she has a very hard time sounding words out—she basically just reads by memorizing words and guessing the ones she doesn’t know based on context. I have tried to help her, but I didn’t really know what to do, aside from just drilling spelling words with her, which she never seemed to retain. Every year I would ask her teachers about it, but they would always say, "She's a good girl, she's fine! If she were dyslexic, she wouldn’t be able to read as well as she does.” But when I saw her younger brother starting to learn to read, and saw how he easily picked things up, compared to what a struggle it was for her, that convinced me. Plus she started to mention that she was embarrassed about her spelling at school. Luckily, I saw Stacey recommended on a listserve for parents of special-needs kids (which I’m on because my son has sensory processing disorder). She has been amazing. My daughter was a bit resistant at first, saying that she didn’t need any extra help, but Stacey was so empathetic and kind, telling my daughter that they are very similar—they both love to read and do (did) pretty well in school, but have/had a very hard time with spelling and sounding words out. She told my daughter that, once she learned the rules of phonics, it was like mysteries had finally been revealed to her. And that has really been true. We have only been seeing Stacey once a week for about 6 weeks, but I sit in on the sessions so I can work with my daughter other days. It has been a revelation to me to see the methodical, progressive way she teaches my daughter the rules of phonics and spelling—so different from how they were taught at school, which kind of jumped around and assumed that kids would just “get it.” (Which, I guess works for kids who don’t have a learning disorder.) Stacey says that she thinks my daughter has a form of dyslexia, but her skills are high enough that she would never be able to get services through school. But I’m so glad that she’s there to fill the gap. I have learned a lot recently about how reading is taught in schools and how it doesn’t really match the way a lot of kids learn—it only works for the kids who learn easily. At any rate, even in this short time, I’ve already seen Stacey’s methods helping—I feel like my daughter’s spelling and ability to sound out words has already gotten somewhat better. In just the first session, I was amazed by Stacey’s ability to quickly pinpoint the specific issues my daughter has, and start addressing them. Her techniques really keep my daughter engaged—she has lots of different exercises, many of which feel like games—and she calibrates the lessons perfectly so they’re hard enough to produce results, but not so hard that they’re discouraging. She is a gifted teacher, naturally empathetic and perceptive, and also extremely knowledgable. She is kind and encouraging, but knows how to keep my daughter focused when she starts getting distracted. And she is organized and easy to work with in terms of scheduling and payment. All in all, we love working with Stacey!
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