About Me

I have a B.S. in elementary education, two specializations in special education including dyslexia, and certifications in reading, math, social studies, and science all with honors from Texas Christian University. Later, I returned to TCU and earned a master's in general education, with honors, which gave me the flexibility to continue to develop exceptional reading strategies. In the first years of teaching special ed, my students were behind in so many classes, and they desperately needed to learn to read. The traditional process of teaching reading was not working to reach them. I researched available reading programs and began to see a need to develop my own based on Orton-Gillingham and Wilson reading principles and strategies. Over the years, I taught specific reading strategies for each of the reading skills, enabling students to experience exceptional success. I developed a multimodality phonetic component, coupled with cognitive mapping sound lists which enabled my students to double their fluency and therefore increase their comprehension. I trained parents so they could help their child at home and volunteers to supplement in the classroom. My comprehension strategies led to exceptional scores on the state standardized reading tests. We scored in the top 6% of Texas reading standardized test scores which was unprecedented for a low-income minority school. My students continually made two and sometimes three years of reading progress in a single year. Several classes won state reading awards, and I have received six Teacher of the Year Awards. I have been a reading specialist for 16 years. I have also taught general ed, gifted, dyslexic and ESL. I love to help students open their world to find the joy of reading. There are several strategies that set me apart from other teachers and enabled my special education students to progress enough to return to the general education classroom, my gifted students to make multiple years progress, and my general education students to earn multiple state reading awards: 1. I test every student over every foundational sound including the blends. I then remediate all missing sounds and monitor the students to ensure mastery is not lost. This is critical if our students are going to make exceptional progress. 2. I cognitively map all the critical phonetic rules using sound lists for each vowel and other sounds. This has helped my students double and triple their progress. 3. I directly teach all the vocabulary words in each story in each book. I write down every word my student misreads or doesn't know. I teach all those missing sight vocabulary words filling the gaps so they can continue to make unprecedented progress. Monitoring the development of their sight vocabulary almost always guarantees they will be great readers. I specialize and have had tremendous success in helping students who read one or more years below grade level catch up and even read above grade level. I ended my career teaching adults in the prisons. This was an easy transition since I had found opportunities to teach reading to adults at different times in my career.

Education & Certifications

Tutoring Subjects