An individualized approach to learning can take months, not years.
The general goal is to have your child demonstrate "average" skills for the current grade level.
PARENTAL GOALS: Your goals may be different than my "default" goals, such as building enough of a foundation so that the support offered from the school system can be more effective. Your child may have successfully bridged many gaps already, but you may still want some ongoing practice and monitoring to occur to keep your child's skills active and improving, or you may want continued help with generalizing skills of reading comprehension or writing in order to successfully complete work or projects in academic subject areas.
Typical Sessions are 30-45 minutes.
Length and frequency of sessions is recommended according to age, grade level, and delivery method (online/in-person). This is designed to work through 4-5 different activities or material sets each session. For clients with current deficits in phonemic awareness, 3 or 4 sessions per week would be recommended if time, finances, and attitude all work together for this frequency.
Sub-optimal attention can affect the amount of work that can be accomplished within a 45 minute session. This can happen as a result of medication wearing off, clients being tired after a long day, environmental distractions, and/or developmental reasons such as very young children having less sustained attention capacity. For students in grades K-2, sometimes we are shooting for 30 minutes of actual instruction time and short breaks, discussion, or trust building built into the session.
How long will this go on?
Well, it depends on your child and the goals and the skill level they bring to the beginning of our work together.
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Learning to read and spell better, to grade level: anywhere from 60-230 sessions (average 120 sessions). The backbone focus of that foundational program is PHONEMIC AWARENESS, and applying that to sounding out for reading and spelling.
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Targeted improvement in Reading Comprehension including prosody, fluency, detail recall, main idea identification, and critical thinking skills: The time it can take to reach comprehension goals varies widely. Everyone can improve with practice. Students beginning with far lower-than-grade-level comprehension could take 120-150 sessions, especially if they are in high school. Students who just need some strengthening and more attention-awareness and notetaking strategies could finish as quickly as 40-60 sessions.
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Writing skills improvement: This program also varies widely in durations estimates depending upon the individual client and intervention may involve independent work assignments (homework) although we will try to incorporate students' own school assignments as much as possible.
How will I know if it is working?
About once a month or six weeks (around 20 sessions between reports) I will send a note or 1-2 page eport to your email address.
I collect data at each session so that I can quickly see if students are responding to intervention methods. Some data that is useful to me on a daily/hourly basis is not useful in an overall form and doesn't translate to reports in short time frames, so you may not see meaningful changes across all strengths in a quantitative report form each week or month.
For specific programs with steps/phases, the reports may be longer as we begin a new phase, and goals will be clearly defined.
Sometimes reporting will be a narrative paragraph or two letting you know what kind of practice we have been doing and discussing observational changes.
For foundational reading skills, I will take benchmark assessments every 4 to 6 months during the session time as needed with DIBELS 8, San Diego Quick spelling list, and a short sampling for Phonemic Awareness.