At Lear Educational Center we use the Wilson Reading System© to maximize the student’s potential to read, spell, and comprehend well. These skills are fundamental to all learning. The Wilson Reading System© is highly acclaimed and widely-recognized for its success in teaching students at all levels, at all ages and for students with learning differences.

Based on the Orton-Gillingham approach, the Wilson Reading System© of teaching is multi-sensory, presenting material via auditory, kinesthetic, tactile and visual senses. This enhances learning and memory connections between sounds and words, making it easier for the students to progress. Materials used are skill level and age-appropriate so as to interest students from childhood through adulthood.

Skills are taught in a particularly effective order and each unit is learned to mastery before moving on to the next. There are 12 units in the Wilson Reading System© and they are usually completed in two years. Because it is a comprehensive learning system, it can accompany the student through the grades.

The individual sessions are 60 minutes long as each session covers ten skills to reinforce the material presented in the session as well as prior learning. The learning is cumulative and the ongoing review and reinforcement of material enhances skills and confidence and maximizes retention of the knowledge.

These skills include letter-sound recognition, knowledge of word elements to enable decoding, oral reading fluency and comprehension, encoding, spelling and writing. Decoding is the use of knowledge of letter-sound relationships to read a word. Coding is the spelling and writing of words.

Wilson teaches total word construction in depth, not just phonics. Students learn to spell and write as they learn to read. As they learn vocabulary and word understanding, they develop word-learning skills. Irregular words are also taught. Listening comprehension and reading comprehension are developed.

Instruction begins with the learning of letters and their matching sounds. Students then are taught to recognize syllables and to decode words, encode words, form phrases and sentences.

Students are taught with flash cards, sounds, sky-writing and tracing letters as well as activities such as a sound-tapping system using fingers and thumb to break down or to blend word sounds. Cards with word elements are manipulated to reinforce knowledge of structure. Because Wilson pictures are simple and used with only certain activities, the students learn to decode words without the assistance of visual clues.

We read by translating segments of printed words (graphemes) into sounds (phonemes). Linking printed letters (vowels and consonants) and syllables to their corresponding sounds, we form words. Knowledge of letter-sound relationships and patterns allows us to correctly pronounce written words that we have already heard as well as sound out words that we haven't seen before. This knowledge also allows us to spell words properly, using graphemes to represent the written words (encoding).

A pencil scoop writing method is used in teaching the forming of phrases and sentences with the words.

The Wilson Reading System’s multi-sensory approach involves the various areas of the brain that are employed in learning and memory, maximizing the student's ability to excel. Effective reading and comprehension requires fluency with the recognition of segments and patterns of word construction.

Rapid recognition and decoding of words is essential to understanding what is being read and to recall what has been read so that the reader can reach the end of a paragraph retaining the awareness of what was read at the beginning.

Lear Educational Center provides tutors certified in the teaching of the Wilson Reading System©. Call us today to register your student.