From Struggling Reader to Top Student: Language-Based Learning Remediation in Nova Scotia

May 7, 2022

At Novaread, we work with families across Nova Scotia who are motivated to invest in their children’s education and overall wellbeing. We do this through the diagnosis and remediation of language-based learning difficulties. Whether a child is struggling with reading, writing, or math — or all three — our goal is to find the root cause and build a clear path forward.

Recognizing the Signs of Reading and Writing Difficulties in Children

The motivation we see from our families almost always starts the same way: a parent notices untapped potential in their child. Day to day, that looks like a frustrated child who is struggling with the expectations of school while appearing to be more than capable of meeting them.

Hints of their potential are easy to spot — they interact well with peers their age, show interest in age-appropriate topics, and can absorb and retain information from conversation, TV, or movies. Yet for some reason they just can’t seem to develop the ability to read or write.

For some children, reading and writing are developing as expected but math is making life miserable. And sometimes, more often than any of us would like to see, it’s both.

These reading and writing difficulties create frustration that spills over into home life — which is why we don’t just work with children, we work with families. The immediate work at Novaread is done one-on-one with our students, but the choice to begin is made as a family, and over time the benefit is felt by everyone.

This case study looks back at one family’s experience — a family whose children were struggling with language-based learning difficulties that were holding them back academically and emotionally.

A Grade 3 Girl’s Journey: Struggling with Language in French Immersion

When we first met this little girl’s family she was in Grade 3. The only language spoken at home was English. Like many families, they made the common and forward-thinking choice to enroll her in French Immersion.

As her grade level increased and the demands around reading and writing increased along with it, it became clear that something wasn’t right. This is a familiar place for the parents of the children we work with to find themselves. They know something is wrong — but unless this is your area of expertise, you won’t know exactly what’s happening or where to turn.

Initially the family tried to find help through a top-down approach to tutoring. When the results fell short of what they were hoping for, they took the right next step: seeking a formal assessment.

Getting a Psychological-Educational (Psych-Ed) Assessment

In this family’s case, they chose to have a Psychological-Educational (Psych-Ed) assessment administered. Whether accessed privately in Bedford or through the public system, Psych-Ed assessments are a comprehensive look at your child’s full learning profile — and they can be brought directly to the school so that accommodations can be implemented as recommended.

At Novaread, we love Psych-Ed assessments — not just for the information they provide, but for what they tell us about the families who choose them. Seeking a private educational assessment in Bedford, Halifax, or anywhere in Nova Scotia is a choice to take action. It says: “I’m not willing to wait and see.” That’s a family we work with very well.

Understanding Literacy Skills and Percentile Scores

Before diving into this student’s scores, it helps to understand two things. First, what skills are actually in use when someone reads and writes — understanding this context makes the data far more meaningful. Second, since all results are presented as percentile scores, here is a quick explanation to help understand those.

Now take a look at the pre- and post-program percentile scores for this student. The bar graph below gives you a visual overview, and the table beneath it lets you see the specific numbers at a glance.

Pre- and post-program percentile scores — intake vs. exit assessment

The Power of One-on-One Language-Based Learning Instruction

By choosing to structure our student-instructor ratios as one-to-one, we gain the flexibility to select the right methodology, choose the right program start point, control pacing, and vary the materials to suit the specific child we’re working with. This is the foundation of effective language-based learning disability tutoring in Nova Scotia.

Tailoring a Remediation Program to Your Child’s Specific Needs

Just because two children are struggling doesn’t mean their difficulties share the same root cause — or the same severity.

We have children come in at Grade 4 with no foundational literacy ability whatsoever. We also have Grade 4 students who arrive with some foundational skills already in place. Testing tells us the difference — whether that’s our own intake testing or the reports parents bring to us from assessments done elsewhere.

These are two completely different students, not just in scores but in age, personality, and learning history. Student one may need a program that begins at the most fundamental level of literacy, Phonological Awareness. That program would move from Phonological Awareness, focusing on Phonemic Awareness as soon as possible, through to sound symbol/grapheme work, onto Decoding, all the while building the most relevant Sight Vocabulary possible, and then moving up to contextual reading and story writing. Student two may not require a start anywhere close to such a fundamental level.

For families in the Halifax–Bedford area searching for dyslexia remediation in Halifax or structured literacy support, this individualized approach is what separates genuine remediation from generic tutoring.

When you look at the details of the testing in Early Reading and Phonological Awareness, the student being discussed here was clearly struggling due to a lack of development in her Phonemic Awareness. Life was made more difficult by the expectation of learning a second language while being predisposed to language-based learning challenges. That said, she would have had a difficult time with English literacy regardless of being in French Immersion.

Understanding the Whole Child

On intake we also learned some of the most important information available regarding this little girl. She loves drawing and coloring, crafts, soccer, swimming (maybe loves swimming but not those early practice sessions ;). She has an incredible imagination and enjoys playing house with barbies.

Student artwork — her love of drawing and crafts is woven into every session

It may not seem like it, but information on what the kids we work with love to do and where they display strength, is almost as important as the information we derive from the testing. We work with them one on one. The reading we do, the game breaks we take and the activities we incorporate into session work can be, and most often are, modified to match what they love.

Building an Individualized Literacy Remediation Program

To build the skills we needed in order for her to flourish: Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness, Sound Symbol Awareness, Decoding and Encoding ability, Sight Vocabulary for reading and spelling, proper reading rate and accuracy — and the resultant fluency, we started at a level where she could meet with success. At a level where she already had the skills needed to work successfully and independently, through our lesson plans.

This got us off on the right foot, where she immediately knew this wasn’t going to be a repeat of her being given work and failing.

From there, and this is a huge part of the work we do with our students, we moved through the steps needed to build everything outlined above at a pace dictated entirely by her. We saw where she is strong and successful and we could use those skills to help her make sense of what comes next.

Maybe she, or others, can segment at the syllable level so we use that to introduce the idea of segmenting at the phoneme (sound) level.

Incorporating methodologies from Orton-Gillingham, we build lesson plans that pull from the previous with just enough movement to ensure constant progress but not so much that our students walk into a new day and see a 20 percent success rate where they were once at 80.

This keeps engagement high and session energy very high. Some days we sailed through the work we had planned out. Some days we encounter a slower pace. Maybe we felt like today was going to look a certain way and on arrival it was clear this little one had a less than perfect day. This happens, and we can adjust. Her instructors were free to make changes in order to get the most from that day.

We can’t finish a child’s entire program in one day but we can definitely ruin the experience if we were to push too hard.

Why Student Buy-In Is Critical to Remediation Success

This student had spent the previous 3.5 years in school “having no idea what anything said or what anyone was saying”.

We want kids to know why they come to us. So in this specific case, we wanted to get her to a point where she could be given something she has never read before and read it. To ensure she would be successful we aligned the reading material with her program level, like we do with all of our students. We wrote it ‘for her’ and made the material accessible, yet challenging enough, through each stage of her growth.

As we do with all our literacy students, we presented her with materials that we knew she had the skills to manage. That isn’t to say the text is predictable for her, far from it. But it is tailored. Were we to pull random books from a shelf we would encounter an unpredictable level of complexity and a high level of error. This crushes session energy because the student meets with frustration.

Matching Reading and Writing Tasks to Your Child’s Skill Level

Because we always knew where she was in her program, we knew the exact levels at which she could decode unfamiliar words. Because of how we built her sight vocabulary for reading, we also know exactly what sight words she has acquired and can use with relative ease.

When we placed text in front of her we knew if it was:

-text that would be considered a low level of difficulty for her, which would mean easier reading so a focus on fluency

-medium level text with a possible focus on building sight vocabulary recognition through its use in context

-text with a high level of difficulty, which would mean slow reading where we want to see her using strategies she may have recently learned.

If the reading is somewhat easy, we do more of it and when it is tougher we only do a few sentences.

The exact same process is used when we have students practicing their writing. You don’t practice the use of capitalization and punctuation if the sentence is composed of words that the student will find difficult to spell. When too much energy is going into what the words should look like, things like grammar will suffer.

Any student will have a finite amount of energy to apply to a task. If that energy is being used up in places it shouldn’t, you will see mistakes that don’t make sense.

Pacing the Program: Moving at Your Child’s Speed

Intake testing gave us everything we needed to know about the start point and methodology required to give our student access to her innate ability, but how do we pace her program? This is extremely important. It is also, with the possible exception of the ability to vary methodology and program content, the single most important aspect of our approach.

It is also something you simply cannot do in a group setting. We build a plan on how we expect things to go yet things don’t always go as expected. That could be something negative, such as a higher than expected level of difficulty with the plan for the day, but it could also mean that we cover far more ground than expected for that day. Either one is fine.

When things slow down, which they do, so do we. We look at what was covered and if necessary we pull some of that day’s lesson into the next day or maybe we insert a .5 type of lesson plan. For example, they are in lesson 8 and moving into lesson 9 however they would benefit from additional work on a specific topic from the previous lesson so we add in a new lesson plan that focuses on that topic and then move on to lesson 9 the next day. Again, it’s impossible to react to situations like this in a group setting.

The other side of this is also possible. Using a recent math student as an example, we knew the necessary start point but were able to skip through four lesson plans very quickly. There is no need to stick to a specific amount of material just because that is all that is on the page in front of us. We want to move through the program as efficiently as possible.

The Twin Study: Why One-on-One Instruction Outperforms Group Settings

One of the many interesting things about the student I have been referring to in this profile is that she is a twin. We are going to look more closely at her sister’s intake and exit scores when we profile her math results; however, this was a unique opportunity to witness the significance of one on one.

Before we met each of these amazing children we knew them only from the Psych-Ed reports that had been sent to us. The Psychologist mentioned that if there was ever a chance to try and work with two children at the same time, this might be it. We agreed given what we saw on paper.

It looked like the program start point was close enough to be the same, methodology was going to be the same, so we gave it a try. Then you realize what should have been obvious in the first place. Kids aren’t just what’s in a report about them.

One of the twins had a stronger personality and that made it difficult for the other to feel comfortable when answering. Quite quickly we moved them into one on one settings and the benefits were obvious. Having had the opportunity to work with both through literacy and math programs we were able to see how varied programs can be despite how similar students can be.

For any family considering language-based learning disability tutoring in Nova Scotia, this experience is the clearest example we can offer: even two children who are virtually identical on paper have meaningfully different experiences in a program. One-on-one is not a luxury — it’s the mechanism that makes real remediation possible.

Why Program Flexibility Drives Better Learning Outcomes

When we look back over program files and think back to conversations being had about their relative progress over the course of their time with us, you see they had unique struggles in different parts of the programs. Each was moving from point A to point B but their paths, were you to chart them, had very different looks.

Something else that was extremely interesting to see were their exit scores side by side. They were almost identical, kind of like the children themselves. So on intake and at exit they tested almost identically however the experience of them on a weekly basis was far from it.

From “Dumbest Kid in Class” to Class Leader: The Novaread Result

At the beginning of this profile we wrote ‘From feeling like the dumbest kid in the class to managing the stress of being the new standard bearer.’ This wasn’t a quote however it is close. When we start the process of working with our families we gather certain pieces of information. The intake form had a quote, provided by our student’s mother, but from the little girl herself. “I feel like the dumbest kid in the whole class.”

When we finished her program I asked her mom what she, the little girl, felt her days were like now. Mom mentioned that the new struggle, for lack of a better word, was that the little girl was in a competition with another student in the class to see which of them would get the highest score in the most recent test. To hear comments like this has always been and continues to be about the greatest form of reward we could ever hope for out of the work we do.

“I feel like the dumbest kid in the whole class.” — and by the end of her Novaread program, she was competing with a classmate to earn the highest test score.

Is Your Child’s Story Familiar? Novaread Can Help.

If your child’s story sounds familiar, we’d love to help. Novaread provides one-on-one diagnosis and remediation for children with language-based learning difficulties at our locations in Bedford and Halifax, Nova Scotia. Contact Novaread to get started →

Questions Parents Ask

How do I know if my child’s struggles are more than a phase?

Watch for daily frustration: homework battles, avoiding reading aloud, spelling that never sticks. If your gut says something is wrong, an assessment replaces “wait and see” with a real answer about exactly which skills are breaking down.

Do we need a Psych-Ed assessment before starting at Novaread?

A Psychological-Educational assessment — private or through the school system — is one way to get answers, and we work from those results. At Novaread, the person who assesses your child is the same person who plans and delivers their program.

Can a child who is years behind really catch up?

The Grade 3 girl in this story went from struggling through French Immersion homework to reading at the top of her class. When the missing foundational skills are rebuilt one-on-one, catching up is exactly what the program is built to do.