For parents

What a reading specialist does, and how A New Page brings many of those daily routines home

A good reading specialist isn’t magic. They do a specific set of things, in a specific order, backed by decades of research. Here’s every one, and exactly how we deliver it.

First, what a specialist looks for

The assessment, finding exactly where your child is, and watching them grow.

• ✓Exactly where your child is in the sequenceOur Starting Check places your child at their precise step, not their grade.
• ✓Can they hear and work with the sounds in words?Every lesson includes sound work, blending, segmenting, and pulling words apart by ear.
• ✓Can they decode real and made-up words?Our check uses real words and “robot words”, nonsense words a child can’t have memorized, which is how you know they’re truly decoding.
• ✓How smoothly and accurately do they read aloud?We listen to your child read once a week and chart their reading speed and accuracy over time.
• ✓Can they spell what they can read?Every session includes dictation, your child spells the words they’re learning to read.
• ✓Progress you can hand a teacherA printable weekly note with the numbers a teacher or IEP team will recognize. Documentation you can actually use.

Then, what a specialist does every session

The teaching, the active ingredients research shows build reading.

• ✓Explicit, step-by-step phonics in a research-based orderWe hand you every word to say, the teaching, the practice, the corrections. Nothing is left to guess.
• ✓Pure, clean letter soundsThe sounds are taught crisply, /b/, not “buh”, because the wrong way makes blending nearly impossible.
• ✓Reading built at your child’s exact levelEvery line of every story is built from only the sounds your child has been taught, so they can actually read it. Almost no one else does this.
• ✓Reading the same lines until they’re smoothYour child reads each line a few times, one of the most research-supported ways to build reading fluency.
• ✓Advance only when a skill is solidYour child moves on only once they’ve mastered a step, and any skill that slips comes back automatically on a spaced schedule.
• ◐Understanding and vocabulary , growingWe build comprehension and word meaning into the stories, and we’re deepening this further.
• ✓Keeping your child wanting to come backThe reading is a real adventure that only moves when your child reads it, plus a parent playbook for the hard nights.