Educational Programs for Those With Learning Problems


If your child is struggling with reading, spelling, math, comprehension, or writing, we can help though our Learning Centre Services. Whether your child is an average learner lacking in motivation or has learning challenges due to ADD/ ADHD, Dyslexia or other learning disabilities (including barriers to academic learning due to Autism), we can help him or her achieve in core academic areas with a few hours per week of one-to-one work with us. 



Why Direct Instruction?






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Direct Instruction curricula is effective for students with a wide range of learning challenges including poor attention and poor recall as well as those who meet criteria to receive special education services.  Even students with histories of failure benefit from DI programs because of the success of these programs to build motivation and task completion through the mastery of fundamental concepts and skills.  Student performance is monitored on an ongoing basis to inform us on how best to accelerate learning. 



Key DI Principles


  • ​Programs and the delivery method are research-based and extensively field tested.
  • Instruction is designed to ensure mastery of the content.  Skills are introduced gradually, giving students a chance to learn those skills and apply them before being required to learn another new set of skills.
  • Frequent instructor feedback, including immediate error correction, and built-in opportunities to positive feedback throughout each lesson.
  • Students are assessed to determine what skills they have mastered and which ones they need to work on.  Instruction is modified to accommodate each student's rate of learning.​​

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About The Programs (selected list)


Reading


​Reading Mastery:  A complete basal reading program that uses the Direct Instruction method to help students master essential decoding and comprehension skills.  Content strands include:

  • Phonemic Awareness
  • Letter- Sound Correspondence
  • Sounding Out of Words
  • Word Recognition
  • Vocabulary
  • Oral Reading Fluency
  • Comprehension

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Corrective Reading: A powerful Direct Instruction remedial reading program series that solves a wide array of problems for struggling older readers even if they have failed with other approaches.  Explicit, step-by-step lessons are organized around two major strands - Decoding and Comprehension - which may be used separately or together to customize instruction for particular student needs.  Each Corrective Reading strand has four levels that teach foundation skills for non-readers up to, and including, the 7th grade level.


Mathematics

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Connecting Math Concepts:  Designed to accelerate the math learning performance of students.  The program provides highly explicit and systematic instruction in the wide range of content found in school curricula.  This program stresses understanding through carefully introducing concepts and then weaving them together as the program progresses.  Lessons introduce new concepts at a reasonable rate to help students both assimilate the ideas and then make connections between them.  Connecting Math Concepts has proven to be highly effective with at-risk students.


Distar Arithmetic: This is a basic program divided into two levels.  In Level I  the focus is on basic addition and subtraction operations.  Lessons are designed so that students master rote, rational and ordinal counting, algebra operations, concepts of more and less, and, simple picture and story based problems.  In Level II, students practice extensions of what they have mastered in the first level, learning to solve column addition problems  (with regrouping), and work with multiplication and fractions.


Spelling


  • Spelling Mastery (Grades 1-6)
  • Spelling through Morphographs

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Three blended approaches are used: the phonemic, the whole word, and the morphemic.   Together, these strategies encourage students to think their way through spelling rather than to memorize word lists.  Combined with repeated practice and application, these programs enable students to spell unfamiliar words and to remember familiar words more successfully than they would through  using other methods.


Language Arts, Comprehension and Writing


  • Language for Learning
  • Language for Thinking
  • Language for Writing
  • Corrective Reading - Comprehension ​

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The Language Programs help develop strong language skills and give students a solid foundation for literacy.  Students not only acquire language skills, but they also learn to think through learning to group objects in different ways, see the logic behind rules and strategies, and to understand how, and when to apply these rules.

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Reasoning and Writing (A-F)

Higher order thinking skills as the foundation for writing skills are introduced in the  Reasoning and Writing (A-F) programs. Concepts such as classification, deductions, retell and clarity of meaning, as well as the process of writing, are explicitly taught.


Reading Success (Foundations - Level C)

This program is effective with students who can decode but struggle with comprehension.  The types of comprehension covered include: vocabulary, asking questions, memory techniques, literal comprehension, reading content and paraphrasing, and, details, pronouns, classification and the main idea.


Expressive Writing (1 & 2)

Students learn basic rules of grammar, punctuation, and style.  Editing is also utilized.  In Level 2 students expand their skills to write a variety of sentences and passages and to edit more complex text forms.

​Brookfield Programs​

​​​​Direct Instruction (DI) is unparalleled in its

ability to improve student performance and enhance student self esteem." (http://www.nifdi.org)