Specialist literacy intervention — what your child actually receives, session by session and day by day.
Most tutoring is an hour in a room once a week. A CDS intervention is a structured teaching system that runs every day — built on explicit, evidence-based instruction, delivered by a qualified literacy-intervention teacher, and carried through the week at home with you. The weekly session starts each cycle; the daily practice is what makes it stick. Here is what one week actually looks like.
Every session is built from scratch for your child against a published, sequenced curriculum — SRA Spelling Mastery and Corrective Reading, the same evidence-based programs used in clinical literacy intervention. Nothing is generic, and nothing is read from a script. A typical week covers:
The session is the smallest part of the week. What drives the change is the daily practice at home — and you are part of it, not a spectator. Every piece is coached, scripted and resourced so you can actually run it.
A few minutes most nights, you read alongside your child from a structured reading program — always a passage they have read before, so it builds fluency and confidence instead of being a fight with new text. I coach you on the method and it is deliberately simple: finger on the word, go slow, and on a slip just point, say the word, re-read the sentence and carry on — no fuss made of a mistake. This parent-led reading is the single biggest lever on fluency; ten quiet minutes a night at home beats one block in my room. I supply the books and the prompts — you supply the ten minutes.
Two short written tasks run alongside the reading, and parents are often surprised they aren't the same thing. They are deliberately doing opposite jobs, and both are done by hand, on paper. The spelling app is the one that catches people out: it's a phone app I built, but your child never types. The phone reads each word aloud; your child writes it by hand on a printed sheet, photographs the page, then marks their own work as the correct spelling is revealed letter by letter — folding the sheet over to rewrite any misses from memory until they're right. The handwriting is the point: writing a word by hand is how spelling gets wired into memory, and typing skips that step entirely.
This week's new material. The word-parts taught in this week's session — what they mean and how they combine — plus the week's sentence and punctuation focus. A few minutes a day, with an answer key so you can check on the spot. Where new learning gets practised.
Everything learned so far. Handwritten, on paper, with the phone reading aloud and checking. It cycles your child's whole growing bank of words on a spaced-repetition schedule — the memory science behind apps like Duolingo — bringing each word back just as it's about to fade. Where learning is made permanent.
One teaches the new; the other keeps the old alive. Your child needs both — together they move a skill from "got it in the lesson" to "owns it for life."
After every session you get a plain-English report: what was taught, how your child went, what to watch for, and exactly what this week's practice is targeting. You are never left guessing what to do at home, or whether it's working.
Every child begins with a full diagnostic baseline assessment — scaled reading and spelling testing, error-pattern analysis, and a written report with a parent debrief. Comparable clinics charge $250–500 for this; with me it's included, because I want us both to know exactly what we're working with before you commit to anything. It tells us where the gaps are and what the plan should be, so no session time is ever spent guessing.
Every child begins with a full diagnostic assessment — reading and spelling testing, a clear picture of exactly where the gaps are, and a conversation about what comes next. Comparable clinics charge $250–500 for this. With me it's included.
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