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THE SJ CHILDS SHOW-Building a Community of Inclusion
🎙️ Welcome to The SJ Childs Show Podcast! 🎉
Join Sara Bradford—better known as SJ Childs—as she bridges understanding and advocacy for the neurodivergent community. This podcast shines a light on autism awareness, empowering stories, expert insights, and practical resources for parents, educators, and individuals alike.
Brought to you by The SJ Childs Global Network, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting autistic individuals and their families worldwide, this show is your weekly dose of inspiration and actionable ideas. Visit sjchilds.org to learn more about our mission, find resources, and connect with our growing community.
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THE SJ CHILDS SHOW-Building a Community of Inclusion
Episode 324-Dyslexia and Dysgraphia Don't Define Your Child's Future-with Daniela Feldhausen
What happens when children struggle to read despite their best efforts? How can parents spot the early warning signs of dyslexia or dysgraphia? And why do millions of children continue falling behind in reading despite classroom interventions?
Daniela Feldhausen, founder of Kids Up Reading Tutors, brings both professional expertise and transformative solutions to these pressing questions. After 25 years practicing law in Washington DC, Daniela discovered her true calling while volunteering with struggling readers at a local elementary school. This passion led her to pursue a master's degree in special education, specialized training in teaching children with dyslexia and dysgraphia, and eventually building a tutoring practice that now helps 70 children nationwide.
The conversation reveals startling insights about how early reading difficulties can be detected—even before formal reading instruction begins. Brain scans can identify dyslexia markers in four-year-olds, and simple games like rhyming activities can help parents spot potential challenges. Daniela explains the science behind phonological awareness, the critical skill that many struggling readers lack: understanding that words consist of individual sounds that can be manipulated.
Parents will find practical strategies they can implement immediately, from car games that build sound awareness to the proper use of audiobooks as a bridge to independent reading. The discussion also clarifies the often-misunderstood relationship between dyslexia (reading difficulties) and dysgraphia (writing difficulties), explaining how they frequently stem from the same underlying processing challenges.
Perhaps most importantly, Daniela emphasizes that effective reading intervention requires frequency—tutoring once or twice weekly simply isn't enough for most struggling readers to catch up. Her innovative online tutoring model allows for the intensive, consistent support these children need, regardless of geographic location.
Whether you're concerned about your own child's reading development or simply interested in understanding how to better support literacy in our communities, this episode provides enlightening insights and actionable solutions for helping every child discover the joy and power of reading.
The SJ Child Show is Bradford's 13th season. Join Sarah Bradford and the SJ Child Show team as they explore the world of autism and share stories of hope and inspiration. This season we're excited to bring you more autism summits featuring experts and advocates from around the world. Go to sjchildsorg to donate and to get more information. Congratulations on 2024's 20,000 downloads and 300 episodes.
Speaker 2:Hello, we are back. It's so nice to be here today and I am really excited with this conversation, some really great value we're going to bring to you today, and we all know how important it is to keep our kids, you know, as up to date in their education and wellness as possible, and that is something our guest, um, daniela Feldhausen hopefully I pronounced all of that right. Um, beautiful. And is it a German last name too?
Speaker 3:it is a german. Last name it's a german. Well, the first name exists in lots of languages, but the last name is definitely german and you know you are here today in germany.
Speaker 2:Bless your heart for being with us. Um total coincidence, but I'm happy to be here. I I love that. I love that Well, and it's exciting that we can do this from so far away from one another. It's so incredible to be able to make these things happen. Tell us a little bit about yourself, the introduction, and we'll jump right into this.
Speaker 3:Sounds good. Okay, so I was actually a lawyer in DC for about 25 years, wow, and I had been volunteering in a local elementary school, working with kids who were having a hard time with reading, and I was just really loving it. And over time I just kept going back to the school and saying, hey, I'm really loving this, can you give me another kid? Can you give me another kid? Back to the school and saying, hey, I'm really loving this, can you give me another kid? Can you give me another kid? And then at some point I decided you know what I like that more than I like the lawyering, or maybe it was just time for a change. Let's put it that way.
Speaker 3:So I actually went back to school, I got a master's degree in special ed. I did a bunch of specialized training in teaching kids with dyslexia and dysgraphia to read and spell, and then I started my own little tutoring company. At first it was just me, but it was way more families who were asking for help than I could possibly help. And then I started training other folks to do this work with me, and so we're up to about almost 20 tutors. At this point I think we're 18 and we're working with about 70 kids all across the country.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Thank you for this special work you're doing, because I love it Absolutely.
Speaker 3:I'm so happy to be helping all of these kids. It makes such a difference in their lives. It really does To be good readers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, my daughter's dyslexic, my husband as well, and so firsthand I understand firsthand what it's like as a parent, what it's like to be a wife with someone who has to help. Sometimes I mean that might be a position people don't understand, so that's kind of interesting. But the power of the right tutor and how magical that can be as well, because having that space where your child can be supported and and you know, for children to be able to have that space to be tutored by someone, I personally saw that difference when someone took the care, the time, the want to help you know my kiddo to and the difference it made in the confidence and how. It's just incredible.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, it is absolutely incredible. And you know, if you look at the results of the nation's report card it's called the NAEP it turns out that there are a lot of kids, millions and millions and millions of kids, who are not reading at grade level. It's not just the kids with dyslexia, it's a lot more kids than just the kids with dyslexia.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and how do we get in there? You know, it looks like we're having a little bit of technical issues, so give me just a moment. I'll have to go back in. Oh, you might be having that same issue, I see I don't know what's going on.
Speaker 2:Go into the settings and go to the camera settings under mirror my camera. If it says catch up my appearance, unclick that, unclick that. Okay, it is unclicked and then hopefully this won't, it won't happen. That was exactly like. What a crazy thing, right, I know, and it's fine. I, four minutes is where I'll, I'll clock it and I'll just go in and erase one minute and 30 seconds or whatever. That's totally fine. Um, but yes, let's see. We will kick off with how important it is to have a kid, have a tutor, you know, take interest in wanting to help those kids and millions of children, like you said, without support or not at reading level level, and it really just seems like reading in general has gone like into, kind of like a I don't want to say unimportant, but people aren't don't seem, as you know, excited about books. Or are parents not putting enough emphasis on the importance of reading and how you have to do it every day of your life?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think definitely things are changing and kids have lots of opportunities to do lots of other things besides reading, but I do think that a big part of it is that the kids don't have the skills to read. They don't have the skills to decode or sound out a word they don't know, which makes reading hard, and most people don't like to do things that are hard for them. And so, you know, the way to get kids reading more, the way to get them to love reading, is to make it nice and easy, and that's what we try to do and hopefully that's what teachers all across the country are trying to do. I mean, we all need to be pushing in the same direction here. We need to make it really easy for these kids to be able to read, so that they will want to read. Yeah, exactly. So that's what I always, you know, tell kids and tell families when I'm first meeting them. You know, we always start out with a conversation with the parents and then I do some screeners with the kids to figure out, you know, what does the child already know and what skills are they missing, and then we can tailor our instruction, our tutoring, to exactly the skills that they're missing, because that's what a lot of kids need.
Speaker 3:A lot of times what's happening is that at some point, you know, the school will realize that, oh my gosh, this child is not up to grade level, is not reading well, and then, if they're in second grade, for example, the child will get extra help with those second grade skills. But the schools don't. Maybe they can't always go back and look and see if are there any missing kindergarten skills or any of the missing first grade skills. And so what we do is we go back and we test the kids for all those things that they should have learned in kindergarten and all those things that they should have learned in first grade and in second grade, and then we start with the earliest skills and shore those up and then build up from there.
Speaker 3:There just aren't. I mean, even if the teachers know exactly what they're doing, they've been fully trained, they've got years of experience, there aren't enough hours in the day, there aren't enough hours in a week to teach kids who are struggling all the things that they need to learn Tricky In some alternate universe. I would love it if everyone decided that reading was the number one skill that kids had to learn in school, and so we're really going to focus on that, and if that means that some other things have to be set aside, so be it. But I might be the only one who thinks that.
Speaker 3:That's not how schools operate. They've got lots of things that they need to teach kids, and so reading isn't the one and only priority which is, you know, it's the reality, it's the reality, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know, maybe start for new parents that might be listening. Are you reading to your little ones? I mean, I know that when I I loved reading, you know, to my kiddos and just to see. And while you were talking, I kind of like I don't know why my brain does this. It shows me things, it makes me feel things, and so I was remembering the first time, or remembering kind of, a story that someone had told me about stories. That's interesting, right, a story about stories. And they told this beautiful story and you had to close your eyes and imagine and envision all of the things, and it was bright and colorful and whimsical and all of these things. And then they showed us a picture and the picture didn't do any justice to the imagination and I thought that it was such a great tool to have that contrast, to see what your imagination can do versus what your eyes can see, just as plain as it can be, and how much power there is in that, in that using that information and using your imagination. So while you were talking, I like remembered that from being a child and remembered that feeling of, oh, I love that, I love the feeling of using my imagination. I guess, I guess I'm a feeler, but so, yeah, I think that that's really fascinating and you know it's important.
Speaker 2:Uh, today, you know, I had my son was reading, um, as an infant I did the your baby could read program and it worked and we did it and it was true for him. But it did not, was not the same, was not the same case for my daughter. It was, um, and how interesting to kind of realize that, um, those challenges, they have to be reconciled, if you will, with tools, with resources, with skills to, because at that age, at a toddler age, you know, I could see that she didn't have the same interest as her brother had. You know, he was doing the same exact thing, um, and it was a very different outcome. And so, and then to find out, you know, years later, that she was dyslexic, and I don't know about you or stories you might have heard, but you know she was a very, um, early learner, um hyperlexic in her speaking, as far as that was going. And so for her teachers it was very, you know, just, they didn't even question whether or not, like she was reading or following along. But then I started noticing a little bit of backwards writing and I brought it up and they said no, no, no, we're not going to test her for that. That's silly. She's so bright, she's always bringing up these questions and she's she has the comprehension down, so that they didn't realize that there was really this gap.
Speaker 2:That first second grade she went completely without any any help. And third grade came COVID also and we were had the opportunity to be home and to see it firsthand. And, like you said, there's not enough hours in the day, there's not enough teachers, there's not enough teachers per child to really be able to like activate that child's you know learning success. And so it was really in that being able to really individualize and like see specifically, oh my gosh, this is one child, these are her skills, like you said, these are the skills. And then these are the you know deficits and things. And how can we fix this? And it was through the tutoring that it was just like this turnaround. But the teachers I was. It was frustrating for me at the after that point to think why would they not have tested her and and started her on this earlier journey of getting success and getting help?
Speaker 3:So, yeah, yeah, I mean there are different things going on in different schools, but you know, it's actually possible to tell at a very early age, like they've done brain scans of four-year-olds, like you can tell when a child is four years old, that later, when you start to teach them to read, they're going to have trouble with reading, like they're actually. It's actually a brain-based thing and they're actually brain differences between kids with dyslexia and kids who don't have dyslexia. The good news is that most of that can get resolved, yeah, yeah. So the kids with dyslexia generally have a really hard time with something we call phonological awareness or phonological skills or phonological processing or phonemic awareness. I mean, there are different terms around it. But basically what all of that is about is whether the child really understands how our reading and writing system work. Do they understand that words are made up of individual sounds and if you put sounds together in different combinations, you get different words? To somebody who's a good reader and a good speller, it's like yeah, of course words are sounds and sounds are words. Of course. That's not obvious to these kids, and so you have to literally teach them in a fun way that words can be broken down Like you start. So there you know.
Speaker 3:We do a whole series of exercises with our students and we'll start, for example, with a compound word like baseball. Okay, can you say baseball? How can you say baseball but don't say base? So they have to break that word into two pieces and then remove one of those pieces. And that is kind of the beginning. That's sort of the entry point into some of these exercises. You do it with two syllable words silver without the umbrella, without the um and then you start breaking down individual syllables into the first sound and then the rest of the word and you basically break it down more and more and more until by the end the kids can take a word and tell you each individual sound in that word. And that's of course super important for spelling, for example.
Speaker 3:Right, if you want to spell a word, you need to be able to hear those sounds in first grade. Then when you get to second grade, then you also have to start knowing more about the word and about you know, is it a past tense word? You have to, you know. So there's more morphology. There are things that get involved, but certainly at the first grade level it's primarily about do you hear all those sounds. Can you separate that word and all those different sounds and then write down the letter or letters that go with each of those sounds? And some kids and it might be that your daughter was one of these some kids actually seem to be reading quite well and nobody really notices the issue until they start looking at the spelling. So I'm kind of curious how was her spelling? Was her spelling good or not so much?
Speaker 2:No, not at all. No, not so much, and that was definitely a struggle point too. And I think, the ability she's 13 now, so she's far past that and now she has the ability to do voice text and all of these other accommodations that she can have to help her. And but also in that, I think that she did a lot of writing down um or watching music lyrics. She loves music and I think it really, really helped in the practice of things you know, and like and, like you said, finding making it fun.
Speaker 2:What are you interested in? What do you want to? What would you be wanting to learn? What do you have a desire to find out more information about, to put them and how to show them that this can be fun and you can use this and these skills are very important for your life and you know, when you go to the grocery store when you're older, you need to read the grocery labels, you need to know what you're buying and you know and things like that. So I there's like practical, real life things that it's, you know, necessary to show them, it's there for, but then it's also it's fun and and there's so much you can get creatively out of it as well.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, absolutely, um. And there there is another option for kids who are struggling with with reading the words on the page, um, which is audio books. Audio books are a wonderful thing, um, kids don't get the practice decoding or sounding out the words, but they're getting all of those other wonderful benefits of reading. They're learning about our language, they're increasing their vocabulary, they're learning about the sentence structure, grammar and syntax and they're learning about the world around them and they have things they can talk to their friends about. I mean, there's so, so, so much that you get out of a book in addition to the practice decoding, which is absolutely important.
Speaker 3:But you know, when we're working with a student, we'll often tell the parents. You know what it might not be. Your child might not be ready to be sounding words out and to be reading on their own right now. But until we get them to that point where they can read on their own, how about you have them listen to a bunch of audio books and maybe even have them listen to series and get them hooked on a series? And once they're hooked on a series on the audio book version, then you know, as soon as their skills are up to par, then maybe we can have a nice smooth transition over to reading the book that you know, with the hard copy piece of paper in front of you, we're on the screen or whatever, but you know sounding out and decoding those words I reading as opposed to you reading. I love that. Yeah, all of your books are a wonderful, wonderful thing.
Speaker 2:What about I'm going to? I'm going to kind of see how deep we can go with this. What about for our really challenged readers, possibly vision impaired readers? How do we help with those students? And do you tutor and have you had those students to work with?
Speaker 3:We have not worked with any students with visual impairments. We've absolutely worked with students with ADHD, on the spectrum, who've had cochlear implants. I mean, we've worked with lots of kids but no one with vision issues. But yeah, I mean, like I said, the audio books are a wonderful, wonderful thing. There's no. A lot of parents are like, oh, but I'm not supposed to let them listen. No, no, no, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, have them listen to audio books.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a hundred percent. And you know, I asked that question because I've, in the past maybe month or so, had some guests who came on who were vision impaired, and I learned so much. I learned so so much and I just I didn't realize the lack of access that is out there and due to those types of things. So it really got me in my creative mind wanting what can I do? How can we, you know, how can we help the help this? But I learned a lot about screen readers and, um, the glasses, the meta glasses and how they can help. So those are just some the glasses, the meta glasses and how they can help. So those are just some side notes that I thought were really interesting to kind of wonder about Go ahead.
Speaker 3:I was going to say, what if kids have the diagnosis of dyslexia, then they can get access. There are a couple of services out there that will give you access to audio books. So there's Bookshare and Learning Ally I think is what the two of them are called and I think one of them is completely free for kids who have the diagnosis and I think the other one is like, I'm going to say, 150 bucks a year or something like that, and you can get books that have been read by a you know, a real life human being, and when that's not available, then you can get books that will, that are read with a computer generated voice. But, for example, you can choose the voice that you want and you can increase or decrease the speed. So there are a lot of things that you can do there. You know, if you're listening to audiobooks as well.
Speaker 2:I love that. What are some tips we can give to parents to maybe, if they're not, they don't know that their child is struggling in reading? How could they identify those struggles?
Speaker 3:Sure, there's a. We actually have a checklist on our website called the Red Flags for Dyslexia. So if you go to our website you can get a big, long checklist of different things to look for. But just briefly, just a couple. One, for example, would be if your child is having a hard time with a particular word, like you've sounded the word out with them over and over and over again and every time they get to that word it's like they're starting from scratch. They're starting all over again. It's just not sticking at all.
Speaker 3:That would be something that might make you wonder. Something else might be they're having trouble with rhyming. So if you ask your child, you know, give me some words that rhyme with bat, and obviously this is age dependent, but at some point they should be able to say oh, you know other words that rhyme with bat are hat and cat and sat and and so on and so forth. If you ask them, you know what rhymes with bat and they say ball, or they give you the big brown eyes. They have no idea what you're talking about.
Speaker 3:I would say that's another flag, because rhyming really is breaking that word down into the beginning part and then the vowel and everything that comes after it, and then you're swapping out that beginning part, what we call the onset.
Speaker 3:And if a kid can't break it apart, those are those phonological skills I was talking about a few minutes ago.
Speaker 3:If you don't have the phonological skills to break that word apart into the first sound and then the rest of the word and then swap that first sound out, you're not going to be able to rhyme. Yeah is if your child's having trouble with articulation, like if they're having trouble pronouncing an L or pronouncing the S or the R or some of the other letters, that's not directlya sign of dyslexia. But there's a large overlap between kids who have trouble with language issues so either articulation or other kinds of language issues and kids who have trouble with reading and writing, reading and spelling. So if there's a family history of dyslexia, or if the child themselves has an issue of being with a speech language pathologist or speech language therapist for you know articulation issues, for example or if they're having trouble expressing their thoughts or understanding what other people are saying, those are all signs of a language-based disorder. And kids with those language issues, many of them, also have then trouble with reading and spelling.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I think that was like four or five or something. Like I said, there's a big, long list on our website, kidsupreadingtutorscom. Perfect.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to write that down too and let's talk about, because some people dyslexia is more widely known, I think, than dysgraphia, and people might not even know what that means. So let's talk about that, give that a definition and dive into that a little deeper. Absolutely, yeah, so dysgraphia is.
Speaker 3:I'm sorry I'm going to start with dyslexia. So dyslexia is considered I'm just going to paraphrase here, but you can go find the fuller definition on the website of the International Dyslexia Association but basically, dyslexia is unexpected trouble learning to read, usually associated with or the result of this problem with phonological processing that we were talking about a few minutes ago. So that's dyslexia. It's all about the reading.
Speaker 3:The dysgraphia, on the other hand, is about writing, and it's a little bit murkier, or broader, if you will, because if you're having trouble writing, there are a bunch of possible causes why you might be having trouble writing. One of them might be that you've got a, you know, a poor pencil grip. You're holding on to your marker or your pencil the wrong way and, as a result, it's really hard for you to form those letters. Or maybe you never learn to form the letters, or maybe your hand gets really tired when you're writing. So those are more about the physical aspects of it, for any of those things that could be considered dysgraphia, and you would go talk to an occupational therapist to get help for your student. So that's sort of one kind of dyslexia or dysgraphia. Rather, who has no problem with a physical act of writing has no problem with spelling or anything like that. They're having trouble organizing their thoughts in order to then be able to clearly write an essay.
Speaker 3:So that's a totally different kind of dysgraphia and for that you might go talk to someone who specifically teaches kids to organize their thoughts. You might be looking at graphic organizers and there are lots of them out there. You just Google graphic organizers to help kids organize their thoughts for the essay that they're supposed to write for school. The other kind, or another kind of dysgraphia is the kind that we work on, which is basically the flip side of dyslexia. So if you've got dyslexia, you're having trouble with this phonological, these phonological skills, and you probably haven't learned the phonics patterns. So the phonics patterns are, for example, if you see an EA in a word, it's probably E like eat, but it might be E like head, or it might be a like great, and so there are all these correspondences between the sounds and the letters that kids have to learn. We call those the phonics patterns, and if a child has dyslexia, generally they're having trouble on the phonological side and generally they haven't learned those phonics patterns. The same thing is true for this particular kind of dysgraphia. If you're having trouble with those phonological skills and you don't know all of those phonics patterns, you're likely to have a hard time with spelling. And so most of the kids we work with are in fact having trouble in both areas. Makes sense, right.
Speaker 3:But we do every once in a while work with kids who are just fine on the reading front. They've figured out the phonics patterns and they've got you know well enough. And then they have good vocabularies, lots of background knowledge and they can just use all of those other skills they've got to get there on the reading front. So the reading comprehension is actually pretty good, but the skills aren't there in order to be able to spell. The memory is good enough to get them there in reading, but they can't actually memorize all of those.
Speaker 3:You know all of the letters and all of the words that they need to be able to spell. So for most kids, dyslexia and dysgraphia are just two sides of the letters and all of the words that they need to be able to spell. So for most kids, dyslexia and dysgraphia are just two sides of the same coin. If you've got dyslexia, you've also got dysgraphia. But there are those handful of exceptions and it sounds like your daughter might be one where reading is fine. It's the spelling that it's a problem, but the underlying issue is still the phonological issue and the phonics issue. And then you have to learn. You know morphology, you have to learn, you know a bunch of other things to be a good speller.
Speaker 2:And so interesting and because I mean we just, like I said, with all the early education going on over here, I thought we were, you know, covering all the bases, but it's just, it's a very unique when you don't know what you're up against, and so it's so helpful to have people like you and kids up reading tutors so that we can get some support for our kiddos if they are struggling. What types of practices do you send parents home with? Homeworks and things like that? Maybe a practice they could start today if they have one they like?
Speaker 3:themselves as kids. That was a long time ago, and so most adults don't remember those phonics patterns. And so you know you don't want parents who don't remember the phonics patterns trying to teach them to children who are struggling to remember the phonics. That is true, not a good combination right there. But parents can absolutely work on the phonological skills with their kids and you can start this at a really young age. You can start this well before your kids are reading, or you can do it later. That's absolutely fine and it's still super, super helpful and it's all you can do, it all in the form of games.
Speaker 3:So, for example, you can do those rhyming, those rhyming exercises that we were talking about before. You can read, like read lots of Dr Seuss books and nursery rhymes, because again, that's all about the rhyming and that's helping kids understand that words can be broken apart. You can also play other games, like maybe you're in the car, you're driving around, and you play a game with the sound b. Tell me all the words you can think of, or maybe everything you see that we're driving by that starts with a, b, and then you want them to be able to say you know bat and ball and boom and you know whatever else. And then, if you know, have them do it with an M at the beginning or with an L at the beginning. Once they can do that easily, like yeah, they can tell you six words that start with the old sound, no problem. Then have them do it with words that end with that particular sound.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and these are things you can do in the car and they're fun and kids will enjoy them. So, yeah, so those would be some good be some good exercises to do.
Speaker 2:This is not what anyone needs to do, but I just think it was fun. The last couple trips that we went on we told my son loves to count and look at letters. He's twice exceptional, totally different animal right there. But uh he. We said okay, well, we want you to count as many um, I think it was A's or T's or whatever. As you can see while we're out on our drives that he doesn't, when he loses internet or something, sometimes he has a really hard time with that settling with those type of things. So we try to get him thinking about other things with those type of things. So we try to get him thinking about other things. I think we got home and he was like um 857.
Speaker 2:And I was like, and I didn't even know what he was talking about, Cause it'd been hours and hours and hours and hours, you know and he was still counting.
Speaker 2:It's just great. So, yeah, you can do fun things like that too and it really keeps their minds active and going. And, yeah, I thought you'd like that. That is a good one. Yeah, funny. So yeah, that's wonderful. Well, I where, um, obviously you offer help online so you're open to everyone, um, and then do you have kind of in-person places where you're at? Well, you're in Germany now You're not getting you don't live there, though.
Speaker 3:I live in Tucson, arizona, um, and all of our all of our tutors are in Arizona, um, but we actually do everything online. We actually do everything over zoom. Um, it works beautifully and it enables the kind of high-intensity tutoring that we do, because once a week or twice a week just isn't going to get most kids caught up in a reasonable amount of time. Our goal is always to get kids caught up as quickly as possible, and now I mean we're in the summer right now, so we're working with close to 70 kids and we are doing our best to get them caught up to grade level by the start of the new school year.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's generally not. You can't do that with once or twice a week for most kids, so we're doing it three or four or even five times a week, especially over the summer, and most parents can't take their child to a tutoring center four days a week or don't necessarily want a tutor in their home four days a week while they're, you know, making dinner or whatever. So, yeah, so the Zoom thing actually works super, super well and we use those Orton-Gillingham materials, so it's multi-sensory education and we can, you know, flip our cameras over and then show the kids that we're you know the manipulatives that we're working with, or we can send them things you know. So we've. We've actually we've been doing this for years now, and we figured out some great ways to make this really interactive as well.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's wonderful. It's been so much fun to chat with you today and get to know you more, and I am just so grateful for these types of services and I understand so much how important it is for our children to just have the most success that they can have. And reading is fun and it's important and it is a practical skill that we all should want our children to have and to be a part of and to enjoy. So so, yeah, make it as fun as possible. I totally love that, and please go to kidsupreadingtutorscom so that you can get any kind of resources. You can connect with Daniela if, if necessary, and um, and she could probably, you know, send you all the other tutors or information that is necessary. Social medias Can people follow you on social medias as?
Speaker 3:well, yeah, absolutely. We've got a LinkedIn presence, instagram, facebook, but most information is on our website, so that's probably the best place to go.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today, and it looks like we hit that sweet spot, right when the sun's about to go down. For you, this has been really really nice and, um, I really appreciate you taking the time on your vacation and, um helping us with these really wonderful, uh, valuable information for families out there. So, thank you, thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thank you for having me. I love talking about this stuff, and if we even help one family, that is a win in my book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you can tell you love it and I love that about it. I love that about you loving it, all kinds of love going on around here guys. So, oh, my gosh, this has been so, so great. I really look forward to staying in touch and, um, yeah, the I want to know all about Germany when you get back. That'd be great.
Speaker 3:Okay, you have a great rest of the day, you too. Bye-bye.
