Contact Rachel
tutoringwithrachelu@gmail.com
Tutoring With Rachel
Let me help your child to be a better and more competent Reader and Speller or to help improve their basic Math skills (K-8th grade only for Math)
- Does your child struggle with Reading?
- With Spelling?
- With staying focused?
- Has your child been diagnosed with Dyslexia?
- Do you suspect your child may be dyslexic?
Let me help your child to gain the skills needed to become a more proficient reader and speller, using The Barton Reading and Spelling System.
Is Math a struggle? Does your child have difficulty memorizing their Math Facts? Are word problems challenging? Has your child been diagnosed with Dyscalulia?
Let me help your child become more adept at learning and using Math skills to solve problems and answer questions. I will customize each lesson for each student to help them better understand Math. We will most likely not be working on the same Math they are doing at school. Instead, we will identify the skills they are struggling with that are making it impossible to keep up with Math at school and focus on those skills to help build a better Mathematical foundation.
Why I Love What I Do
I am very passionate about education and believe that everyone can be successful, but that some people just need a little extra help.
I enjoy being the person who gives them that extra help and watching them shine with confidence as their skills improve.
What happens during a tutoring session and
how will your child benefit from one-on-one tutoring?
Since no two students are alike, during our first tutoring session I will get to know your child and run some quick assessments to see what their strengths and struggles are and tailor a plan just for them. For students with dyslexia or with concerns of dyslexia I use the Barton Reading and Spelling System. For students needing Math help, we will work on the basic skills that are missing, that are causing your child to struggle with their current coursework.
We will move at the pace your child needs to move at. It is not simply about finishing the lesson or the book, it is about making sure your child has mastered one skill before moving onto the next. So often in a traditional school setting, the teacher is forced to move on before all of their students have mastered a skill. This unfortunately is how students often fall behind. One of the many benefits of doing one-on-one tutoring is that I can focus all of our tutoring time to the specific needs of your child.
As your child progresses through the program, I will do my best to make it fun and interactive. Barton is a multisensory program that uses different approaches to help students learn, use, and retain the information. They will be using their touch, sight, verbal and auditory senses in each lesson. I always supplement our lessons with educational games to help make learning a little more fun. As your child’s skills improve, so will their confidence and self-esteem.
Students working on their Reading and Spelling skills with the Barton Reading and Spelling System come twice a week and students working on Math skills come one to two times per week.
Whether we are working on Math or Barton, each session begins with a review of previous skills and will last 55 minutes.
About Your Teacher
Rachel Uffer
I earned my B.A. in Family and Consumer Sciences with a focus on Nutrition from CSUS in 1999 after which I worked as a health education volunteer with the Peace Corps in West Africa. It was during this time that I discovered my passion for teaching. After returning to the States, I worked in various forms of education from managing a private tutoring center to testing students for learning disabilities at a community college and tutoring Math, to teaching English as a second language in both Colombia and California. After earning my Masters in Education from Humphrey’s University in 2019, I used my language teaching skills to transition from teaching English as a second language to working one on one with students using the Barton Reading System to help improve their reading and writing skills.
One of the reasons this is so important to me is that as a child I struggled a lot in school, and could have used someone like me to help me in all aspects of my education. I know, if I had had a tutor like me, my grades would have been better and I would not have struggled with both learning and the lack of self-esteem that often accompanies learning differences.
What Is The Barton Reading And Spelling System?
The Barton Reading and Spelling System is a phonics based, research backed OG (Orton-Gillingham) program created for the dyslexic brain.
Research has shown that an Orton-Gillingham remediation system is the only system proven to be effective for people with dyslexia.
The Barton Reading & Spelling System is a one-on-one tutoring system, created specifically for the dyslexic brain, that will greatly improve the spelling, reading, and writing skills of children, teenagers or adults who struggle due to dyslexia or a learning disability.
About Dyslexia
“Dyslexia is a neurologically-based, often familial, disorder which interferes with the acquisition and processing of language. Varying in degrees of severity, it is manifested by difficulties in receptive and expressive language, including phonological processing, in reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, and sometimes in arithmetic.
Dyslexia is not the result of lack of motivation, sensory impairment, inadequate instructional or environmental opportunities, or other limiting conditions, but may occur together with these conditions.Although dyslexia is lifelong, individuals with dyslexia frequently respond successfully to timely and appropriate intervention.”
-Revised Definition from the International Dyslexia Association
Warning Signs of Dyslexia
If a child has 3 or more of the following warning signs, encourage that child’s parents and teachers to learn more about dyslexia.
In Preschool
- Delayed speech
- Mixing up the sounds and syllables in long words
- Chronic ear infections
- Severe reactions to childhood illnesses
- Constant confusion of left versus right
- Late establishing a dominant hand
- Difficulty learning to tie shoes
- Trouble memorizing their address, phone number, or the alphabet
- Can’t create words that rhyme
- A close relative with dyslexia
In Elementary School
- Dysgraphia (slow, non-automatic handwriting that is difficult to read)
- Letter or number reversals continuing past the end of first grade
- Extreme difficulty learning cursive
-
Slow, choppy, inaccurate reading:
- Guesses based on shape or context
- Skips or misreads prepositions (at, to, of)
- Ignores suffixes
- Can’t sound out unknown words - Terrible spelling
- Often can’t remember sight words (they, were, does) or homonyms (their, they’re, and there)
-
Difficulty telling time with a clock with hands • trouble with math
- Memorizing multiplication tables
- Memorizing a sequence of steps
- Directionality -
When speaking, difficulty finding the correct word - lots of “whatyamacallits” and “thingies”
- Lots of “whatyamacallits” and “thingies”
- Common sayings come out slightly twisted -
Extremely messy bedroom, backpack, and desk • dreads going to school
- Complains of stomach aches or headaches
- May have nightmares about school
In High School
- All of the above symptoms plus:
- Limited vocabulary
-
Extremely poor written expression
- Large discrepancy between verbal skills and written compositions - Unable to master a foreign language
- Difficulty reading printed music
- Poor grades in many classes
- May drop out of high school
In Adults
- Education history similar to above, plus:
- Slow reader
- May have to read a page 2 or 3 times to understand it
- Terrible speller
-
Difficulty putting thoughts onto paper
- Dreads writing memos or letters - Still has difficulty with right versus left
- Often gets lost, even in a familiar city
- Sometimes confuses b and d, especially when tired or sick
What Is Dyscalculia?
Dyscalculia is a learning disorder that affects a person’s ability to understand number-based information and math. People who have dyscalculia struggle with numbers and math because their brains don’t process math-related concepts like the brains of people without this disorder. However, their struggles don’t mean they’re less intelligent or less capable than people who don’t have dyscalculia.
The symptoms of this disorder usually appear in childhood, especially when children learn how to do basic math. However, many adults have dyscalculia and don’t know it. People who have dyscalculia often face mental health issues when they have to do math, such as anxiety, depression and other difficult feelings.
Warning Signs of Dyscalculia
Young children (up to the pre-K and kindergarten levels)
- For very young children, the most common symptoms include trouble with:
- Counting upward.
- Connecting a number to that many of an object (for example, connecting the number 4 to that many marbles in front of them).
- Recognizing numbers and math symbols.
- Organizing numbers, such as largest to smallest or first to last.
- Recognizing and using number lines.
- Learning using money (such as coins or bills).
School-age children (primary/grade/elementary school)
- The symptoms of dyscalculia often draw attention when children start school around age 6. For these children, the symptoms include trouble with:
- Counting on fingers with small numbers (especially at an age where that seems unnecessary).
- Identifying small quantities of items just by looking (this looks like needing to count each one by one).
- Doing simple calculations from memory.
- Memorizing multiplication tables.
- Recognizing the same math problem when the order of the numbers or symbols changes (struggling to understand that 1+7=8 is the same as 8=7+1).
- Understanding word problems or more advanced symbols (such as > meaning “greater than” or < meaning “less than”).
- Organizing numbers by scale (10s, 100s, 1,000s) or decimal place (0.1, 0.01, 0.001).
Teenagers (secondary school- or high school-age) and adults
- The symptoms in teenagers and adults often look like trouble with the following:
- Counting backward.
- Solving word problems.
- Breaking down problems into multiple steps to solve them.
- Measuring items.
- Measuring quantities (such as for cooking/baking recipes).
- Using money (coins and bills) to pay for items, exchanging bills for coins (and vice versa) and making change.
- Understanding and converting fractions.
Emotional symptoms
- In addition to symptoms that directly relate to someone’s ability to do math, people with dyscalculia may show emotional symptoms when faced with situations where math is necessary. Those emotional symptoms often include:
- Anxiety (including test anxiety) or even panic.
- Agitation, anger or aggression (such as temper tantrums in younger children).
- Fear (including a fear or even phobia of going to school).
- Physical symptoms of any of the above (nausea and vomiting, sweating, stomachache, etc.)
Hear What People
Are Saying About Rachel
Last semester for the first time Gabriel read a poem out loud to a student and parent assembly. As a parent of a child with severe dyslexia and ADHD, I truly never thought that day would come. Rachel has been essential to the success Gabriel has achieved with reading, we couldn’t have done it without her!
- 3550 Watt Avenue #312 Sacramento CA 95821
- tutoringwithrachelu@gmail.com