Parent Resources
How to Claim Orton-Gillingham Tutoring on Your Personal Income Tax Return (Updated for the 2018 Tax Year)
A few years ago, I posted an article on our blog with some ideas and advice on how parents can claim our tutoring as an expense on their taxes. Most of the article was written by Mike Campagne, who is a local expert on tax relief for those with disabilities, including the parents of kids…
Read More2017-2018 School Year Registration
Registration is Open As most of our Symbols parents know, our school year registration for 2017-2018 opened up just a couple of weeks ago. As expected, our tutors’ schedules began to quickly fill up. In fact, some of our tutors are already completely booked in their after school time slots. In order to make sure…
Read MoreWhat Way Does Your Child Learn Best?
At Symbols, we believe that multi-sensory learning is the best way to get children to learn. During the intake assessment, which is done in the first four lessons, one of the first things the tutors are required to teach the student is the concept of VAKT (Visual/Auditory/Tactile/Kinesthetic), and the four learning pathways. While all four…
Read MoreTypical Lesson at Symbols
Two times a week, you drop your child off at Symbols for lessons with their tutor. Each time they come home, they’ve learned new information, which helps them in school. But what actually goes on for the hour that they are at Symbols? We asked two tutors to explain, for a typical Language Arts student…
Read MoreWhat is an IEP?
When parents register a child at Symbols, part of the registration process includes forms that they are required to fill out to give us more information about their child. Some questions we ask are the child’s grade and school, whether they’ve ever had a psych ed report, and whether or not they have an IEP,…
Read MoreWhat Are SWP’s, And Why You Should Order Them
As all of our Symbols parents know, registration for the summer term is now open. While this registration is extremely flexible, (lessons do not have to be booked twice a week as during the school term), as much as possible, we want to keep learning and the retention of information up. This is where SWP’s…
Read MoreWhy We Love Hearing Before Seeing
One concept that Orton-Gillingham tutors believe is the importance of developing phonological awareness skill sets together with phonics development, especially in students who are struggling. What are phonemes? Phonemes are the smallest part of spoken language that make a sound. They can be as small as one letter, for example “t”, “b”, “l”. Phonemes are…
Read MoreSummer 2017 Registration
The school year and this term at Symbols may be coming to an end, but our summer term is right around the corner. This year, the summer sessions begin on Tuesday, July 4th and end on Friday, September 1st. We have announced the registration dates for each location, which are as follows: VANCOUVER: Monday, May 8th at…
Read MoreWhy we Love Word History
If you saw the word “ghoti”, how would you pronounce it? What if I told you that this word read aloud sounded like “fish”? If we didn’t know how “fish” was spelled, this could very likely be the spelling! The gh, is pronounced [f] as in enough, the o, pronounced [ɪ] as in women, and the ti pronounced…
Read MoreWhy We Love Fingers in Dirt
At Symbols, we believe in a multisensory approach. This is in part because different children learn differently. One way that a child can learn is by being a tactile learner. What is a tactile learner? Tactile learners are closely related to kinesthetic learners. The main difference is that the tactile style is more moderate, involving…
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