What Should Individualized Literacy Tutoring Look Like?

As a parent, few things are more important than your child’s confidence. Did you know a child’s self-perception of their reading ability has a significant impact on their self-esteem and confidence? The way your child views themselves as a reader (or a non-reader) as well as their feelings about reading are influenced strongly by affective factors. The impact of children's attitudes towards reading are well-researched. As Dougherty Stahl, Flanigan, & McKenna (2020) explain, "If we acknowledge the importance of our students' becoming lifelong readers, it makes sense to learn where they stand in relation to that goal and to take steps to help them attain it" (p. 244).

Maybe your child is struggling to keep up with grade-level expectations. Maybe they’re doing “okay,” but you’ve noticed reading seems more frustrating than it should. Maybe your child would prefer to crawl under their desk, fold laundry, wash dishes, or cut the grass with a ruler and a pair of scissors instead of reading. Or, maybe you simply want to give them a strong boost before the next school year. No matter where your child falls on that continuum, individualized literacy tutoring from someone with advanced reading training can make a world of difference.

What Makes Literacy Tutoring with an Experienced Reading Teacher Unique?

A teacher with a specialization in reading is more than just a tutor. We’re certified educators with advanced training in how children learn to read and write as well as how to identify and address the root causes when those skills don’t come easily. We can recognize struggling readers and use various tools to pinpoint their greatest challenges then determine how to approach instruction that moves the needle from struggling to aspiring to proficient.

In what follows, I’ll touch on some of the expectations you should have when working with any reading or literacy tutor to ensure the best outcomes for your child.

Tutoring sessions should never be one-size-fits-all. Every child should receive a customized plan based on their current strengths, gaps, learning styles, and goals. Whether your child is a reluctant reader or simply needs help gaining fluency or confidence, we build a plan that meets them where they are and moves them forward. 

Importantly, that plan should be incredibly flexible and fluid. Assessment is often undetectable by the child but hugely informative for the tutor - This is what will drive future instruction. It is a cyclical process I drill into my graduate students who are working towards their reading specialist certifications: assess, analyze, design meaningful and engaging instruction, rinse, and repeat. Everything should serve a clear purpose during this incredibly valuable 1:1 time.

Every aspect of every tutoring session should be thoughtfully planned with the intention of achieving something specific, whether it’s building rapport, learning about your child’s interests to inform future instruction or text selection, or focused on their specific and unique reading goals.

What Happens in a Typical Tutoring Session?

Every session should look a little different, because every child is unique in their needs and their feelings about reading. But, here’s what you should generally expect:

Assessment-Informed Instruction

Your tutor should begin with informal and/or formal assessments to understand exactly where your child is in key areas like phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. This gives us a clear picture of their needs and helps set realistic, measurable goals. If you have reports or data from your child’s school, please share them! The more data we can triangulate, the better we can understand exactly what your child’s needs are and how we can meet them.

Targeted Skill Building

Each lesson should include direct, explicit instruction in the skills your child needs most, like decoding tricky words, building reading stamina, or understanding story structure. There may be work on phonemic awareness and/or phonics, sight words, fluency, prosody (or reading with expression), and reading comprehension. Skills should be focused on those most appropriate for your child’s reading proficiency level and the standards they are expected to meet in their grade level. 

Personalized Activities

Your tutor should always use research-based strategies paired with engaging, age-appropriate texts. For younger readers, this might include movement, word games, or read-alouds with discussion. It will often include multisensory work where the reader can manipulate letters and sounds. For older students, we might focus more intensively on close reading for deeper meaning and responding to text through writing. The analysis of text becomes exponentially important as students’ comprehension skills develop and become more sophisticated.

Ongoing Feedback

Your child should receive supportive feedback throughout each session to build confidence and independence. You should also receive updates, so you know what your tutor is working on with your child and how they are progressing. Celebrating even the smallest successes is hugely important to continue building your child’s confidence and self-image as a reader!

Who Benefits from Customized Literacy Tutoring?

Children who are significantly behind:

If your child is struggling with basic reading skills or has started to feel discouraged, early intervention can change their entire academic trajectory. We identify the specific roadblocks and build, or rebuild, skills with patience and significant encouragement.

Children who are “almost there”:

Maybe your child reads but skips words, quickly loses focus, or misses the deeper meaning of what they’ve read. Often children who struggle can read all, or most, of the words but can’t necessarily make appropriate sense of them when it comes to comprehension. Tutoring can close those gaps before they widen, helping your child start the next school year with confidence.

Children who want to stay ahead:

Literacy tutoring isn’t only for students who are behind. For some families, it’s about giving their child an edge with more advanced vocabulary skills, stronger reading comprehension, or well-organized writing skills.

Why Summer Is the Perfect Time to Start

Without consistent reading and writing practice, many students experience the dreaded “summer slide”. This is how we describe a loss of skills over the break. Individualized tutoring not only prevents that slide, it can help your child gain ground while other students are standing still. It’s also a great time to rebuild confidence in a lower-stress setting.

It’s important to remember that tutoring, especially in the summer, should be fun! Tutors should be gamifying when possible, providing fun and engaging texts and activities, and doing everything they can to ensure students don’t dread their sessions. Summer is a great time for creative activities: think water balloons, hopscotch, super soakers, writing outside with chalk, staying active, and getting messy!

Let’s Build a Plan for Your Child

Your child deserves to feel successful, capable, and proud of their progress. Whether they need to catch up, keep up, or get ahead, literacy tutoring with a teacher who has a literacy specialization can provide the tools, encouragement, and fun sessions it takes to get there.

If you’re ready to learn more or set up a consultation, contact me via the form below or by emailing me at rachel@drlella.com. 

Let’s help your child fall in love with reading again or for the first time!

Dougherty Stahl, K.A., Flanigan, K., & McKenna, M.C. (2020). Assessment for reading instruction (4th ed.). The Guilford Press.