Deborah Sensel-Davis Dyslexia Tutoring
About
I am a Scottish Rite Certified Orton-Gillingham tutor who has been working with students for ten years. I continue to expand my knowledge of how to best teach students with dyslexia via professional conferences, workshops, and online seminars, as well as from each encounter with the unique set of deficits, skills, and gifts each student brings to the tutoring relationship. My clients have ranged in age from kindergarteners through seniors in high school.
I love discovering each of my students' unique abilities and figuring out the best ways to help each one grow their skills in reading, writing, and spelling.
Highlights
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Frequently asked questions
What is your typical process for working with a new student?
All lessons are individualized for the unique needs of each student—there is no “curriculum”—and begin with the multisensory, systematic, phonetically-based, Orton-Gillingham (O-G) approach. Learning the letter-to-sound (grapheme-phoneme) correspondence of our alphabetic written communication is the foundation of what we do, but exploration at the word and sentence levels of written English is crucial to mastering a system that can make our thoughts “visible” to others.
At their simplest, O-G lessons consist of reading (decoding), writing (including proper letter formation) and spelling (encoding). Once the student can demonstrate a reasonable—not necessarily perfect—understanding of the one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correspondence, lessons quickly come to encompass higher-level concepts such as English language etymology (Where do these words come from? And why are they spelled that way?) and morphology (What “chunks” of the word have meaning?) and semantics (What do we have to do to words to create sentences that make sense and convey our ideas?).
What education and/or training do you have that relates to your work?
I am a Scottish Rite Certified Orton-Gillingham tutor. In 2008, I completed the 32° Masonic Initial Level Training Course, a program accredited by the International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council (IMSLEC). Certification for my Orton-Gillingham Advanced Teacher Training was awarded by Children’s Dyslexia Centers, Inc. in 2011.
I have been tutoring students at the Children’s Dyslexia Centers of Cincinnati since 2008 and began supervising new scholar/tutors for the Dyslexia Center in 2009. I opened my private tutoring practice in 2009. I continue to expand my knowledge of how to best teach students with dyslexia via professional conferences, workshops, and online seminars, as well as from each encounter with the unique set of deficits, skills, and gifts each student brings to the tutoring relationship.
Do you have a standard pricing system for your lessons? If so, please share the details here.
Individual lessons are $80 per 50-minute session. Paying a monthly tuition subscription rate and committing to a set number of lessons per month can lower that cost considerably.