A Reading Intervention for Homeschool

If your child is more than a year or two behind in reading, regular instruction will not be enough.  Most likely there is an underlying cognitive skill delay that is hampering progress.  Until that delay is resolved, reading is going to be a struggle.

Dealing with deep-seated delays is a tough assignment for a homeschooling family. There are a lot professional help and interventions available at schools, especially if you can get your child an IEP or 504 plan. 

However, if you are going to homeschool, Gemm Learning is an alternative to the Special Education resources of a school  We provide individualized reading interventions that target the most common source of reading delays. We aim to break the cycle of reading frustration. Once reading is easier, more automatic,  everything else comes more comfortably.

It is a home-based program with remote coaching – ideal for homeschool families.

If you are looking for homeschool reading practice or reading instruction in selected areas, e.g., spelling, our program is not for you. However, if your child is struggling with or resisting reading, if she is taking too much time over assignments or if the standard homeschool reading curriculum is a challenge, then Gemm Learning should be considered.  We have helped many homeschool families.

Our Program

We provide Fast ForWord, a series of rapid-fire language, cognitive and reading exercises that have the intensity required to move the needle, to accelerate cognitive and reading development.   

While Gemm Learning does not provide a complete homeschool curriculum, it is an intervention that works well for homeschool families:

• Live coaching and support
• Adaptive software, children don’t get stuck
• We create individualized plans

Our program managers monitor activity every day, check in on a regular cycle or as needed and provide remote coaching. We send weekly reports, completion certificates and background information on the science behind our programs.

Fast ForWord is used in schools – in Special Education with IEPs — and in clinician offices.  Gemm Learning provides Fast ForWord at home using the same approach. It’s the equivalent of sending your child out for services, except you can manage it yourself, at home, as part of your normal daily routine.

Homeschool Reading Program Progression

Start with Cognitive Skills and Phonics

Rather than using a phonics program or spending hours with flash cards — all intended to work around an underlying cognitive weakness — our program works on phonological and language processing.  It helps students process more quickly and more accurately, making them more phonics aware, reading-enabled.

Our goal is to provide a reading makeover that will prepare your child for learning phonics and reading. Without this fundamental cognitive improvement, reading will always be a challenge.

Reading Comprehension

Most reading comprehension difficulties are caused by inefficient decoding (reading). The reader is concentrating so hard on reading the text, there is little available mind-space for extracting meaning (comprehension). Gemm Learning has a two-step program:

1. Make decoding automatic. If a student is able to decode effortlessly, subconsciously, like riding a bike, his or her brain is able to fully focus on comprehension. Our program removes the cognitive impediments to reading automaticity.
2. Reading comprehension. Once our program has improved reading fluency our homeschool reading programs focus on reading comprehension and accuracy — undoing prior bad reading habits, instruction on language structure, vocabulary and syntax, and practice in reading comprehension, both literal and inferential.

We vary our homeschool supplemental reading programs by age and according to the needs of each child.

Not All Children Need Help

Our homeschool reading program is not always necessary.  Separating a perfectly normal slow start to reading  from a more serious reading difficulty that will not likely resolve itself is not easy.  See if any of the reading problems here fit your child.

Or take our free online reading assessment that can give you a good idea of where your child stands. It takes about 30 minutes.

To find out if our solution can help your child and to have your questions answered, start with a free consult with a Gemm Learning team member.