After-School Tutoring Changes Lives

The Settlement’s dyslexia intervention program serves students and families in a variety of ways. These include our Reading Labs at more than a dozen partner school sites throughout the region, during our intensive summer tutoring program, and through both in-person and virtual after-school tutoring during the fall and spring semesters. 

Caroline, a student from the fall semester of our after-school tutoring program, made significant progress by working alongside her tutor Kasie, a member now serving in her second year with the ReadingCorps project. 

Here’s what Kasie, who connects virtually with her after-school students, had to share about Caroline’s success:

I started working with Caroline in August of 2021. At that time she was having difficulty remembering vowel sounds and with passage comprehension. This often led to her becoming frustrated and staying focused during our lessons when dealing she would encounter unfamiliar words.

Over the year and a half we have worked together,  I have seen her grow in her literacy skills. We have even worked on breathing techniques for when she is feeling overwhelmed so that she can regain her focus and tackle the words she has difficulty with by utilizing the skills she has learned through her tutoring sessions.

Caroline can now confidently read and write words, phrases, and sentences. She has improved her reading comprehension of passages and short stories and can now easily discuss the story after reading it, even giving her own opinions regarding the moral of the story that she has read! Whenever she is dealing with a word that is more difficult, she can recognize when she is becoming frustrated, take a proverbial step back, use her breathing exercises, and tackle it with the skills she has learned in tutoring. 

It is clear that Caroline has developed a new love of reading and writing, and has even proudly spoken of her drastically improved testing scores in reading, spelling, and writing through school. She shows up for her sessions smiling and ready to work. I am excited to see her continued progress this spring!