Certified & Experienced Reading Teacher (10+years). Wilson Reading and Orton Gillingham Certified. All ages welcome!

Nina and I had a great time together today. She is a joy to work with and listens/ follows directions well! The first thing we did was "getting to know you bingo." We found out some things that we have in common and some other interesting things about each other. She seemed to really enjoy that and, of course, she won! :) After that I introduced her to the "clue words" or "structure words" for the Visualizing and Verbalizing program. The program encourages starting with pictures first and then moving on to words and sentences, no matter the students age/ grade/ ability level. So we looked at some silly pictures and wen through the structure words and tried to capture them all in sentences. I discussed with Nina that it helps to be able to make a "mind movie" or picture what we are reading. It also helps someone else who can't "see inside your head" or "be a mind reader" to know what you are thinking. She really enjoyed and did well describing the pictures, but can improve her skills in putting all of that into 1-2 verbal sentences. She had trouble when we got to visualizing a word , as this was new to her. I modeled this and asked her to try to picture what I was saying. We will continue working towards that. After that we did a "book tasting." She likened it to taste testing that you do at home. We read a bit (a few pages) of 2 books that I had selected for her. One is called "Just Harriet" and is about a girl named Harriet who is very funny and narrates her adventures to the reader. The other is called "The One and Only Ivan." She seemed to like "Just Harriet" better when she was rating the books after we read them. We played a quick vocabulary game at the end as a reward and she got every single vocabulary word right when given the definition! I look forward to working with her next time!