1.    Introduction to Phonemic Awareness: Can You Read My Lips™?

Strong phonemic awareness skills can be critical to reading. Phonemic development outlines the variety of phonemic awareness skills that must be developed, the stages of development and the ages at which they typically develop. Lips™, Lindamood Bell’s program designed to help children develop the earliest skill levels, is described in detail and examples of Lips exercises are provided.

2.    When Phonemic Awareness Isn’t Enough: Identifying and Remediating Storage and Retrieval Issues

Success with many common academic tasks is heavily dependent upon a child’s ability to rapidly store and retrieve information, often in sequence. Reading comprehension, writing, math and the ability to make inferences or analyze information all depend on accurate recall of facts or rules. This presentation outlines the nature of memory issues that can impact academic performance, the testing used to identify a child’s particular deficits and the programs and exercises that can be used to remediate these deficits. Case histories that demonstrate the progress that can be achieved are also provided.

3.    Phonological Awareness: Understanding Phonics in Context

This presentation describes the attributes of phonemic awareness, the ways in phonemic awareness or a lack of phonemic awareness impacts reading skills in children. It also outlines the ways a teacher might decide where to start with a particular student, underlying learning deficits that may need to be addressed first, and the remediation options that are available. BBT insights and case histories are provided based on our own experience with students with whom we have worked.

4.    Seeing Stars™: Teaching Sound to Symbol Conversion – A Critical Phonemic Awareness Skill

This presentation describes Lindamood-Bell’s Seeing Stars program and outlines where it fits within the spectrum of programs that address phonemic awareness deficits.  This deficits and situations where Seeing Stars is particularly useful are discussed and specific examples of the program and its applications are provided.

5.    Plain English for Parents: Talking About Learning Issues & Impaired Children

In this presentation, the emotional and other challenges faced by parents of children with learning deficits are discussed along with a discussion of the best ways to talk to parents about their children, their children’s special needs and the solutions and tactics that can best help them adapt to their unique learning style.

6.    Interpreting Storage and Retrieval Testing

Many of the tests used to evaluate academic performance have components that can be used to measure storage and retrieval performance and capacity. This presentation outlines many of the tests used by Brain Builders Tutoring and the way they are used to assess memory performance. Various storage and retrieval profiles are outlined and their implications for academic performance are discussed. Tools that can be used to address memory deficiencies are outlined along with tutoring strategies and approaches that are most likely to be successful.

7.    Tutoring The Learning Impaired Child

This comprehensive presentation describes the processes and tests used by Brain Builders Tutoring to evaluate a student who may have learning deficits and the kinds of deficits and behaviors we look for as we define a child’s unique learning profile and any deficits that may need to be addressed to help them improve their academic performance. Priorities for tutoring are discussed along with the array of tools that can be used to develop a customized tutoring program for a particular child. Sample of some of the exercises are provided, and case histories are used to demonstrate the results that can be achieved through tutoring.