We provide evaluation and treatment for children with reading issues like dyslexia or other language and literacy disorders.

We work with children from kindergarten through high school whose parent, teacher or therapist is concerned about their spelling or writing skills, and who struggle to meet grade level expectations. Depending on your child’s evaluation and needs, we work on his or her receptive and expressive language skills, as well as reading, spelling and writing skills.

Evaluation and treatment

During a language and literacy evaluation, the speech-language pathologist will talk with you about your child’s history and complete a full language assessment. This includes assessing your child’s reading ability at the single word and passage level, as well as his or her spelling, non-word reading (which uses nonsense words to evaluate your child’s ability to identify letter sounds) and other skills as needed. Testing will take about two hours.

Conditions we diagnose through evaluation include:

• Developmental dyslexia
• Language-based reading disorders
• Phonological processing disorders
• Spelling disorders
• Writing disorders

The speech-language pathologist will recommend treatment depending on the results of your child’s evaluation. Treatment sessions are typically one hour each week for three to six months. Parents are directly involved in treatment sessions, and we provide a home program so you can help your child’s progress between sessions.

Treatment helps to improve:

• Receptive and expressive language skills
• Phonological awareness
• Reading skills such as decoding
• Sight word vocabulary
• Passage comprehension
• Spelling
• Writing skills

Signs of reading difficulties

Some signs that your child may have dyslexia or another reading disorder according to his or her age or grade level include:

Pre-K and kindergarten:

• Delay in talking
• Difficulty recognizing and producing rhymes
• Difficulty remembering rote information, like letter names
• Difficulty remembering or following directions

Grades 1-3

• Difficulty with sound/symbol correspondence
• Confusion with letters that look alike, such as b and d or w and m
• Confusion with letters that have similar sounds, such as d and t or f and v
• Difficulty remembering common sight words such as “was,” “the” or “and”
• Difficulty blending individual sounds to make words
• Reading and spelling errors that indicate difficulty sequencing sounds (for example, writing or saying “blats” instead of “blast”)
• Leaving out grammatical endings, such as –s, –ed or –ing, when reading and writing

Grades 4-8

• Difficulty reading and spelling longer, multisyllabic words
• Difficulty identifying word structure, such as prefixes, roots and suffixes
• Difficulty learning new information from text because of reading errors
• Significant difficulty with writing, due to spelling and organizational problems
• Slow rate of reading

Contact us

For more information or to schedule an evaluation, call us at 727-767-4141.

You can also request an appointment online using our online form.

Medical records may be faxed to 727-767-6743.