About Symbols Learning, the Reading, Writing and Math Tutoring Program for Children with Learning Difficulties and Differences

Rob's family moves on to the same street as Kimberley's family in North Vancouver, three houses down.  Kimberley is a successful competitive rhythmic gymnast, attending a high school program for athletes that limits academic hours to support training time.  She requires some extra support in math; Rob tutors her in math in exchange for a steady supply of her mom's famous cookies.

After several failed attempts on Rob's part, he finally succeeds in convincing Kimberley to go for dinner with him.

Kimberley is about to complete her undergraduate degree at UBC.  She has been supporting herself by working as a nanny for a wonderful family with three boys.  The children are reaching an age that they no longer need a nanny, but the eldest has been determined to be dyslexic.  The family offers to pay for Kimberley to take an Orton-Gillingham tutoring course if she agrees to tutor their son.

Kimberley earns her Orton-Gillingham certification after completing her coursework and practicum through CATT.  Soon after, she completes her undergrad and graduates with a Bachelor of Arts from UBC.

Kimberley is working as a private, independent OG tutor, working in a home office in her parents' house, traveling to students' homes, and working within schools throughout Greater Vancouver. Her waitlist grows, and she is so busy with students that she puts over 80,000 kilometers on her little Toyota Echo in two years, driving from student to student!

Rob starts his MBA program at UBC. Early in the MBA, Rob takes an entrepreneurship class. The class involves a group project in which the group is to write and present a business plan for a new venture. The night before the idea for the business plan is due, Rob's group meets to pitch each other ideas, and ultimately pick the best one for the project. Rob's idea is healthy fast food. Everyone hates it. In fact, nobody likes anybody's initial idea. So the group starts to brainstorm. Rob tells the group about Kimberley's private tutoring business, and suggests it could be operated similarly to other bricks-and-mortar learning centers, except specifically in the niche of offering 1-to-1 Orton-Gillingham-based tutoring for children with learning differences. The group loves the idea, and with that, the seed of what will later grow into Symbols is planted.

Rob later completes his MBA in 2006.

Rob and Kimberley get married in downtown Vancouver. Within days they are off to Paris for their honeymoon.

The lease is signed; Symbols is incorporated; the logo is designed; the furniture is purchased. Kimberley and Rob move into their first Symbols location at West Broadway and Balaclava in Vancouver.

Struggling to find excellent, qualified OG tutors to hire, Rob and Kimberley realize that in order to continue to grow Symbols, they would need to instead begin hiring the best people they can find, and then train them in the OG approach in-house.  Kimberley works very closely with the former head OG trainer and director of CATT to ensure the Symbols OG training program is comprehensive and lives up to the highest possible standards.  The first round of Symbols OG training takes place later that year.

Kimberley and Rob welcome their beautiful redheaded baby girl, Grace, into this world.

Kimberley and Rob welcome another beautiful redheaded baby girl, Valerie, into this world.

Symbols opens the doors to its new Coquitlam location at Ridgeway and Marmont.

Symbols opens the doors to its new Richmond location on Alexandra Road near Lansdowne Centre.

The building in which Symbols' original center is located is being redeveloped.  Symbols moves several blocks east to a building near West Broadway and Burrard.

Kimberley and Rob welcome another beautiful redheaded baby girl, Madeleine, into this world.  Kimberley and Rob come to understand they are capable of one, and only one, recipe:  redheaded girls.

The COVID-19 Pandemic causes lockdowns and presents very serious health risks associated with continuing 1-to-1 in-person tutoring.  Symbols decides to close all of its learning centers for in-person tutoring and rapidly shifts to on-line lessons.  The shift takes place seamlessly, with Symbols having closed its learning centers at the start of Spring Break, and tutors and students ready to begin online tutoring the Monday after Spring Break.  Over Spring Break, Kimberley develops and distributes online training for all Symbols tutors in how to effectively conduct multisensory, OG-based tutoring over Zoom.  Symbols designs, assembles and distributes hundreds of custom home multisensory learning kits for all students and tutors to use during online lessons. 

Within a few short months, Symbols reaches the remarkable milestone of having completed 10,000 hours of 1-to-1 online lessons.

After 13 years of conducting Symbols in-house OG tutor training, with several rounds of training each year, and dozens of outstanding tutors having completed the course, the training has been improved and refined to the highest standard.  However, with multiple rounds of training each year, each being conducted in-person by Kimberley and consuming upwards of 40 hours of her time each round, the model is unsustainable for growth.  The solution?  A digital online training course.  After many months and countless hours of hard work, Kimberley and Rob complete the development of a full digital online Symbols OG training course using the Trainual corporate training platform.  The course includes digital copy, dozens of videos, images, a discussion forum and unit tests.

The results are better than anticipated.  The built-in unit testing helps ensure that trainees are fully understanding all concepts.  And the fact that tutors retain access to the course throughout their employment with Symbols ensures that any concepts or units can be revisited easily at any time, something that is not possible with in-person content delivery (without a time machine).  Within a few short months, three rounds of new trainees have completed the course, and are demonstrating a deeper and more complete understanding of concepts, and are requiring less mentoring support, than graduates of the prior in-person training program.

Thanks to the success of Symbols online 1-to-1 tutoring over the past two years, and the development of the Online Tutor Training Course which supports expansion, Symbols opens its doors to new online students from across Canada and beyond.

Symbols opens the doors to its new Langley location in Willoughby Town Centre.

Symbols opens the doors to its new North Vancouver location on Lonsdale and 20th.