The Ravinia Reading Center Difference

Ravinia students arrive here with a broad range of histories and many different degrees of reading compromise. Families often come to us after numerous tries in various settings, their schools and other “experts” having recommended ineffective solutions or have minimized the need for help. In addition, sometimes their child's problem has not even been correctly identified. Parents begin to hear the Ravinia name, sometimes from professionals, but most often from other parents whose children have had spectacular success here. They call when they see that other things are not working, not working well enough, or that the struggles aren't going away on their own, as promised.

With our top-of-the-line practitioners who have the right training, our rigorous attention to both the most current research and our own observations, and our materials designed to be customized to each student's specific deficits, Ravinia students go further than their families ever thought possible.

At Ravinia, we never rely on only one program or one publisher for our materials. Good materials exist from a variety of sources and we're happy to use those. But the bulk of our work with our students is accomplished with materials I've created to address the gaps my practitioners and I have discovered in the vast nexus of commercial reading products.

One such gap is important enough to mention here. Most commercial reading products weigh in on either a literature-based, sight approach on one side or a structured phonics-based approach on the other. Both have limitations.

A literature-based approach attempts to teach the words that readers will actually need to know but falls short because of its overreliance on guessing from context and picture cues and on memorization. Additionally, this approach offers little structure.

A systematic phonics or Orton-based approach still relies on the use of memorized words, but less so – singling out those that are considered phonetically irregular, also known as “sight” words. And these approaches are far more structured than literature-based programs, teaching rules and to sound words out. Therefore, the phonics approach teaches skills that are infinitely more productive but its creators have been less mindful about the realities of the words readers truly need to know. Valuable learning time is spent practicing nonsense words and words rarely needed. When was the last time you used the words peplum or quoit?

Why couldn't we teach the rules, the phonics, the sounds and be mindful of the utility of the words we taught? I spent the better part of a year developing materials that ensured that we did just that.

As a result, we've been able to maintain all that is good about sequential, structured and cumulative teaching but we've left the nonsense and not useful words behind. When our materials contain examples of words that fit patterns, those words are ones your child needs…words that they see in their books every day.

We work sequentially, like the phonics programs do, but also move out of order so that kids learn something new while they perfect their last task. When our students work on short vowels, for instance, we work until total mastery but may introduce oa (as in boat) or ar (as in car) while continuing to work on short vowels. We move more quickly this way and offer our students the words they need to know, but faster. Other programs are so pattern driven – finding words to teach necessary patterns – that they sometimes overlook what kids really need to know. We teach systematically and we teach the important words. We can do that at the same time.

Now for a word or two about memorization: we don't teach it here. We have a joke around Ravinia Reading Center that we don't believe in sight words. There are ways to figure out almost any word. The word "they" is often taught as a sight word but we teach our students that the long ‘a' sound can be spelled 'ey' and that it's spelled that way in other words too, as in hey, survey and convey. The word "they" is one that can be figured out by students using rules and guidelines that work.

We limit our rules to the ones that will hold up. The old saying “I before ‘e' except after ‘c'” is not a good rule. The words believe, fierce, chief, receive are consistent with it, but leisure, seize, caffeine aren't. We don't teach it. Traditional syllable division rules don't work very well either, as there are too many exceptions. We only teach rules that work – rules that clarify and don't confuse.

At Ravinia Reading Center speech-language pathologists, with their exquisitely trained ears, tailor programs for each student. When people ask us if the lessons can be taught to groups, the answer is a resounding no, as they would no longer be tailored were that to occur.

A final note: While other programs accumulate mistakes, sometimes encouraging students to read faster even when their first reading was not correct, we have found this to be a practice that reinforces errors. We have no error practice here, but rather use our time to practice correct reading. And practice is the key. Some kids have an easier time learning to read than others from the beginning. But nothing improves for anyone without time spent practicing correctly. Everything here is doable and motivating because reading is a skill and it can be taught.