Multi-Sensory Tutoring for Dyslexic Kids ft. Dr. Emily Levy, Founder and Director of EBL Coaching

Individuals with dyslexia can absolutely learn to read. They just need a specialized approach. Orton-Gillingham, like I mentioned, I can't speak highly enough of the method, has done wonders where there are countless kids that we worked with that started as non-readers that are reading chapter books and have come to enjoy reading. Got me diagnosed when I was in third grade, and it was the most relieving day of my life because I finally had like kind of a place to hang my hat and say, see, I told you I'm not lazy, definitely not stupid.

I just learned differently, like that's totally okay. We were dyslexics, we were often, you know, just set up for failure because, you know, we were given books and tasks that really are not appropriate for the level that we were at. So how do you expect anyone to be open to learning when their entire relationship with reading, with learning, is physical pain? Wish I had understood when I was younger that the fact that my brain worked differently than people meant that I would be good at things in ways that other kids were not going to be good at.

I can't be dyslexic because letters don't jump up or down for me. Dyslexia is not a disorder. It is not a disease. Once you sort of own it and embrace it, then you can have the power to deal with it. It's sort of empowering and also enriching to the whole community. To those who don't understand what dyslexia is, that it's not a negative, it's not a problem, it's like we keep saying superpower.

Hey, everyone. We are Sonja and Nick, and this is Dyslexia Journey. And today we are welcoming Dr. Emily Levy to the show. Dr. Emily Levy is the founder and director of EBL Coaching, a specialized tutoring program that offers individualized one-on-one home, virtual, and on-site instruction using research-based multisensory techniques. She graduated from Brown University and received her master's degree in special education from Nova University in Florida. She also completed her doctorate degree in education from Nova University.

Dr. Levy is also the author of Strategies for Study Success, a 22-part student workbook series that teaches students strategies for test-taking, note-taking, reading comprehension, writing, summarizing, and executive functioning, along with the Flags and Stars Art and Gillingham student workbook series, which helps students develop their fundamental decoding and spelling skills. Additionally, she is the author of Flags and Stars Multisensory Math, a multisensory math program that helps students develop a stronger understanding of core math concepts.

So, Dr. Levy, welcome to Dyslexia Journey. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here today. So, to start with, perhaps you could just give us sort of an overview. We're going to delve into this in more detail, but a little bit of an overview of your background and the coaching that you do? Absolutely. I'd be happy to. I actually grew up in the field of special education.

My mother was the founder of a school for students with learning disabilities down in South Florida, which is where I grew up. So, I spent a lot of my childhood working at her school, observing students, working with students, observing teachers, and really seeing how effective instruction could really change the lives of these students. However, with that said, I thought I wanted to carve my own path, so I went to Brown University.

I then did finance, of all things, for a few years before quickly realizing that education, special education, is my calling. So, I ended up going back, I pivoted, I received my master's degree, as you mentioned, in special education and my doctorate degree in general education. And I really started on my own, working with students, myself, tutoring kids who had all different types of special education needs, dyslexia, other types of learning disabilities, ADHD, autism, all types of special education students, until eventually I saw what a tremendous need there was for this kind of specialized tutoring, and ended up slowly, organically growing the tutoring program into what it is today, where we now do national tutoring to students throughout the country, and actually worldwide, along with our more local, in-person tutoring.

Excellent. Yeah, that's so interesting. Yeah, your background, you know, that you had such early exposure to it. Yeah, and a lot of people who are involved in dyslexia education come to it from sort of a personal perspective of having dyslexia themselves, or having someone in the family. But in your case, it sounds like you were exposed to a lot of people with learning differences through your mother's school then. Exactly. Many people actually ask me that question, do I have a child or a relative who has a special education need?

And the answer is no. My mother's brother had a learning disability, and I think that's what inspired her. And then I ended up, as you mentioned, working at her school, and that was really where my foundation came from. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that's really interesting.

Just to clarify, so because you mentioned realizing that the tutoring was necessary at one point. So before that, and I might have just missed this, before that, were you actually working within a school system as the special education teacher? I actually did not work in a school system. I worked at schools pulling kids out and providing one-on-one remediation to them. That's always been my specialty, is that one-on-one remediation and seeing what a tremendous difference it could make for students in terms of building their core skills.

Okay. Yeah, let's dig into that a little bit more. Why is the direct one-on-one instruction so important? Well, it's so important because it allows us to truly individualize the instruction to the needs of each student. As you know, when it comes to students who have specialized learning needs, they all move at a different pace. They all have unique needs. Some kids are able to quickly grasp certain concepts, but then need more time devoted to other concepts in order to grasp them.

And so when we work with students on a one-on-one basis, we're able to truly individualize the instruction to their specific and unique needs. Right. Yeah. That definitely sounds like such an ideal situation. I'm wondering, of course, the techniques as well, right, are so important and such a big part of this. And we'll probably dive into some specifics even in more depth, but sort of an overview again. Like, what do you find are the techniques that are most essential?

What methods or techniques are most essential and why? Sure. So all of the work that we do, the methods that we use with students, are research-based and multisensory. And really, we find that when we use a multisensory approach, we engage the senses, we engage the student, and it really helps the material to sort of stick in their long-term memory. One method that I would imagine you're familiar with is the Orton-Gillingham method, which is a specific research-based multisensory technique that helps students develop their decoding and encoding skills, or essentially their reading and spelling skills.

It's so incredibly effective, and it's amazing what a difference it can make when we use that method, especially on a one-on-one basis, in helping students to develop those core reading and spelling skills. And a quick follow-up on those. You're right that we've talked about some of these before, but I never know quite, like, what is coming across to the audience, you know, what pieces. So I think it's important to keep talking about.

I wonder if you could give us a sense of, like, how that might look in an individual session. Or maybe do they look pretty similar within sessions? Do they look very different from each other? And how does that sort of look? Like, I don't know, not necessarily an example lesson, but, you know, something to give people sort of a concrete sense of what happens. Yeah, so there are some aspects of the lessons that are very similar, meaning many of the multi-sensory tools that we use might be similar, like using whiteboards, audiovisual flashcards, colored sand, shaving cream.

A lot of those tools are similar. But in terms of the actual content that we're working on, that really varies based on the levels of each student. For instance, if we're working with a student that really doesn't have a solid knowledge of the letters and their corresponding sounds, we might focus on individual letters with a key picture that goes along with the sound that corresponds to that letter. We might start with a card drill and then go into sky writing, go into sand writing, do some workbook exercises.

And we might work on blending sounds together to form basic two and three letter words. But there might be students that are on a multisyllabic word level where we're teaching them rules for how to break down those longer multisyllabic words. So that lesson would look a little bit different just because the level of that student would be different. Right. Yes. No, that's helpful. I think even just hearing about the different tools and like what is meant by multi-sensory, those specifics, the shaving cream, the sand tray, like it's helpful to hear that.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And the kids do like the tools. They really engage. Yeah, they sound fun. They are fun. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of one thing that our daughter did is work with clay, doing sort of clay words. Yeah. Clay is great. There's so many different versions of the multisensory tools. And sometimes we'll change it up. We might do instead of colored sand, we might do sugar if that's all the family has in their house.

So we can tweak that a little bit, but the key is just keeping that multi-sensory approach in place. And you mentioned workbooks as well, and I think you've developed some yourself. Could you tell us a little more about those? I have. I have developed three different series of workbooks throughout the years, really now over the past 20 years, which makes me sound old. But the first series is called Strategies for Study Success.

And by the way, they're all research-based. Strategies for Study Success teaches students strategies for reading, comprehension, writing, test-taking, note-taking, summarizing skills. And it both teaches students strategies in a concrete, systematic way, but then gives them lots of repetition in order to really master that concept. And I think especially with kids who have special needs, kids who have dyslexia, they really need a lot of repetition in order to grasp concepts. And I just couldn't find anything else out there that I felt met the needs of these students, which is really why I started to develop these workbooks.

Then I also have the Flags and Stars Orton-Gillingham Student Workbook Program, which focuses on the Orton-Gillingham method, starting at the level of individual letters and their corresponding sounds, and then moving upwards through words with blends, consonant digraphs, silenite patterns, vowel digraphs, multisyllabic word patterns, and so on. So it really follows that systematic approach. And then the other workbook series is our Multisensory Math Program, also called Flags and Stars, which uses a multisensory approach, but focuses on those foundational math skills, addition, subtraction, double-digit addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fraction.

So really those foundational math skills. What, I'm curious, what multisensory approaches do you use for math? Well, with math, we integrate a lot of manipulatives, but they're not just kind of general manipulatives that we pull from here and there. They're specific ones that correspond to the lessons that we're teaching. So really, we do integrate some clay, we integrate lots of different tools, again, just based on the lesson that we're teaching.

Yeah, manipulatives are so important. And I like math. And so it's, you know, especially when kids are young, to get that really concrete before they can move to the sort of symbolic aspects of math. Yeah, what are those numbers? The Cuisinaires? Oh, Cuisinaires, that's what they're called. We're familiar with those. Yeah, we integrate those as well. Yeah, excellent. So I'm curious, because you mentioned repetition, if you find that some kids are resistant to that, are you able to vary the lessons enough, you know, so the kids aren't bored?

Because I feel like that is something that is so important, but is like one of the biggest challenges. It can be challenging. Of course, it depends on the students. Some are resistant, some are not. There's a wide variety there. But we do try to keep the topics as interesting as we can. We change it up a little bit, for example, if we're teaching them how to construct a simple paragraph, for instance, which is made of a topic sentence, three detail sentences, and a conclusion sentence.

Instead of using mundane topics, we'll try to bring in topics that they're interested in, like winter sports or candy types that you can eat or whatever they're interested in. And we try to bring that in as a way to kind of hook them in to doing the practice and the repetition that they really need. Which is where that individualization really helps, I think, because you can craft those lessons, right, tailored to them.

Do you ever get kids who are just so, I guess, to put it bluntly, have been kind of damaged by the school system and really feeling badly about themselves and maybe require some extra care and motivation for it? How do you handle that? Sure. So the answer is sadly, yes, we have many kids who have had so much negativity in their lives. They feel like they're a failure. They have very low self-esteem, really common.

And a big part of our approach is really building their self-esteem and using more positive reinforcement in a very concrete way, meaning we want to show the students the progress that they're making. So if we're working on writing, for instance, and when we start with them, they can barely put one sentence together, but then maybe four months later, they're able to write a basic paragraph. Instead of saying, wow, you're doing great with writing, we'll actually show them, look at what you were doing four months ago and look at what you're doing now.

You should feel so proud of the progress that you've made. And really showing them concrete examples of their own progress so that they can really start to feel good about themselves and start to see their own growth academically. We also try to encourage parents to play up their strengths. So if a child, for instance, has dyslexia and maybe really struggles with reading, but they're amazing at art, it's so great to focus on that strength.

Have them take art classes, have them do painting so that other people might also give them that positive reinforcement about how great they are at art. So I always try to encourage the strengths in addition to building the weaknesses as well. Yeah, that's definitely something that we try to always emphasize too, because, you know, with a dyslexic brain, I mean, with everyone, of course, we have strengths and weaknesses, but there are specific ways that often dyslexic people are, you know, tend to have strengths in particular.

So it helps to think of it that way. So before we leave off of the methodology and the individualization, so COVID, right? COVID and the virtual, so you do offer virtual tutoring anyway, but I don't know, was that something you transitioned to more during COVID? And like, do you find challenges with that or does it kind of just work just as well as in person? So the answer is, we did a little bit of virtual tutoring before COVID, and then we quickly pivoted and quickly developed lots of resources and technology so that we could continue to support students during COVID.

And now many families actually really like it as an option, especially if they're traveling or there's a period of time where maybe they can't meet in person. Or some kids, especially if they're a little bit older, tend to really prefer that. In terms of how we approach it, and it's funny because a lot of parents initially have this knee-jerk reaction of a virtual was so bad during COVID and my child was in a class of 25 and it was a disaster.

So the first answer is when virtual sessions are done on a one-on-one basis, it's completely different than being in a class of 25, especially with a special needs child. The other piece is that we have, as I mentioned, created a lot of resources and technology so that kids and tutors can really engage as though they were in person. Things like, we might send a package of multi-sensory tools and materials and books to the family, and the tutors will have the same ones so that they can engage together as though, again, they were working in person.

So we found that to actually be really effective for many students, and we're also now able to help so many kids that might not live in the New York, New Jersey area and can't access these services. And maybe they live in a more remote area where they are not able to access an Orton-Gillingham tutor or a specialized approach to tutoring. So it's really been a great way to help so many more kids in so many different geographic areas.

Yeah, that's a really good point. It really helps with access a lot. Well, I'm wondering about if you have any particular success stories. We always like to hear those, too, though we talk about the struggles and challenges a lot as well. It's really always heartening to hear, really, those individual stories. I was wondering if there's any that you'd like to share with us. Yeah, absolutely. I love when parents reach back out to me years after we work with their child and tell me what their child is up to.

And we've had so many wonderful success stories. I was actually just emailing with a father of a student we worked with who was in middle school at the time and struggled with all academics, struggled with executive functioning. And his father told me he's now attending Georgetown and really doing very well and wants to study law. So I love hearing that. There's also another boy that I worked with back in the day.

He was in kindergarten at the time, was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia and was bouncing off the walls. And I didn't know if there was any hope in me helping this child. But I worked with him for many years myself. I used the Orton-Gillingham method and I really focused in on his academic skills. And his mother reached out to me not too long ago to say that not only did he graduate college, he went to engineering school and is now working as a successful engineer.

So, again, these stories warm my heart. They keep me going every day. And it's really a reminder that sometimes for kids who have dyslexia, ADHD, other specialized learning needs, getting through school is the challenge. But if they can get through school with the right support, they're usually, many of them are so brilliant at, have the potential to be so successful in life, it's getting through school that can be challenging for them.

Yeah. School is not real. School is not life. Right. Right. It's true. Yeah. One thing that we try to emphasize on Dyslexia Journey is kind of debunking some myths. And, you know, one of them is that one myth is that if you're dyslexic, you're never going to learn to read or you're never going to learn to read fluently. And so I think, you know, we really just can't say that enough. So I wonder if you could talk to that a little bit.

So the answer is, of course, as you know, dyslexia doesn't go away. But individuals with dyslexia can absolutely learn to read. They just need a specialized approach. Orton-Gillingham, like I mentioned, I can't speak highly enough of the method, has done wonders where there are countless kids that we worked with that started as non-readers that are reading chapter books and have come to enjoy reading. There may be other challenges down the road.

Writing might become a challenge for students with dyslexia. Sometimes reading comprehension might become a challenge if they have to read more complex words. So it is a journey, and sometimes the support needs to evolve and change. But without a doubt, individuals with dyslexia can learn how to read as long as they receive the right support. Yes. And like you said, we can't say that enough. So I think it's just great to hear it.

And, you know, from personal experience from having worked with so many of these kids. So that's great. I guess along the lines of sharing your wisdom, I'm wondering if you have any advice or a top tip for parents of a dyslexic kid, perhaps at any stage of the journey. Sure. Well, I'm a believer that a parent is always their child's best advocate. They should always have communication with their child's teacher, both in the beginning of the school year, throughout the course of the school year, and every year thereafter.

The child might be doing well one year, but then they can quickly take a turn. So I think really always keeping an eye on your child, being their advocate, staying in touch with their teacher, and just making sure that their child is always receiving the right, the appropriate services that they should be getting. Yes. It's so important. It's definitely part of the journey. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It sure is. Yeah. And then what, you know, I already talked about sort of one myth that we'd like to debunk about people with dyslexia.

And the sort of idea that they can't learn to read. If you could tell the general public kind of one thing about dyslexia, what would it be? Well, I would say that there are many gifts associated with dyslexia, just because reading may be a struggle. Most people I know who have dyslexia have many strengths and many gifts. And it's important to not lose sight of that because, as I mentioned earlier, they have the potential to be incredibly successful in life.

Yes, absolutely. What about anything you'd like to say to a dyslexic kid out there or a teen or, you know, at any age, really? Sure. I would say, you know, try not to get down on yourself. You might see that your peers are reading chapter books when you can barely read a few words or a few sentences. But you're probably very smart, very creative, have a lot of strengths, and know that we all have strengths and weaknesses.

You may need some specialized support to help you with reading, but you have the potential to be incredibly successful in life. Yes, very important to hear. Yeah, again, I think dyslexic kids can't hear that enough. Right. I agree. Although I will say, I liked also how you mentioned earlier, when you're giving, when you're encouraging them, that you do use the concrete thing, because I think that's important. I mean, it's great to say in general, you know, and even point to other people, but if we can ever point out their own strengths or, or as you said, like show them their own successes, of course, that goes even deeper.

It really does. It feels real to them. Right. Yeah. Exactly. So any final things you'd like to share or otherwise we'd love to hear how people can get in contact with you? Sure. Well, on our website, which is eblcoaching.com, there's a ton of resources for families, articles that I've written, different podcasts that I've spoken on, lots of information about dyslexia, other learning disabilities. And of course, parents can learn more about our services, our one-on-one specialized tutoring that we do.

And again, we're now able to help kids throughout the world. We have students in Asia and Africa and all over, which has really been exciting. And it's just a great way for us to help other kids. We also have channels on Facebook, on Instagram, and on TikTok. So parents are certainly welcome to check us out there. And I'm also happy to answer direct questions to parents anytime that they want to reach out to me directly.

That's fantastic. I didn't know you were worldwide. That must be a little bit of a challenge with time zones, but otherwise it sounds great. Time zones are easier. Asia does get a little bit, but we try to manage, you know, as much as we can. Great. Well, that's fantastic. And hopefully everyone will reach out to you with any questions or to connect through services. Definitely. Yeah. Well, we really appreciate the work that you're doing.

Thank you so much. And thank you for sharing your wisdom today. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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