Online tutoring is a convenient and cost-effective way to provide your child with additional academic support while saving money and time compared to traditional in-person tutoring. When looking for reading tutoring, especially for elementary students, it's essential to ensure that the curriculum has a proven track record of teaching children how to read and is based on the Science of Reading. Additionally, the digital platform should be engaging to maintain your child's interest with challenging and fun activities. It's also important that the tutors are certified and enjoy working with children. Finally, progress monitoring is crucial to know how your child is improving, making it a critical factor to consider before investing in online tutoring.

Tutoring sessions are held over Zoom and are 45 minutes. Parents help their Learner log into Sharpen Reading, our purpose-built digital platform, and then share their screen. Once a session begins, parents are only needed if the Learner experiences computer issues. With Kindergarten students, we ask parents to sit with their child for at least the first few sessions.

The Tutor will guide the Learner through our series of carefully sequenced activities built on the Science of Reading. Activities are paced to optimize student engagement and deep learning and include sounding out words and word parts, performing tasks with letter tiles while connecting those sounds to letters and letter combinations (decoding). Activities are designed to leverage the most proven, most effective ways to teach core decoding skills. With fun names like Word Puzzle, Tap and Say and Breaking Words Apart, students are actually building their foundational orthographic map and practicing critical skills like sound discrimination, phoneme manipulation and phonemic awareness.

Our goal is to accommodate the needs of our students and their families. Parents can choose to schedule two or three sessions per week around times that are convenient for both you and your child. The goal is to set a consistent schedule each month which ensures that your family can plan times that work for you, while also not looking too far out in the future. Since lessons are conducted online and from the comfort of your own home, no time is wasted on travel.

Ensuring the success and progress of our students is a top priority. We use a comprehensive approach to monitor and assess your child’s progress through a combination of personal feedback and technology-driven assessments. Here's how.

Direct Tutor Feedback:
Our tutors maintain detailed notes on each student's learning journey. After every tutoring session, tutors complete session feedback forms that include observations and insights. This personalized feedback highlights the student's strengths, areas for improvement, and any significant milestones reached during the lesson.

Evaluation Activities:
We also utilize the advanced capabilities of Sharpen's digital reading platform. The Sharpen Tutoring Platform includes specific activities to evaluate a student's grasp of the skills they have been learning. Activities such as Flash Card and Sound Game are scored, providing objective feedback on the student's performance