The Perks of Being A Silent Elephant “e” Tutor

The Perks of Being A Silent Elephant “e” Tutor 

As you know, Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e” is the program that teaches learners the way they love to learn. It is systematic, language-based, multi-sensory, and FUN! It’s fun for learners and teachers! It engages the whole learner and accelerates ALL children’s learning, even if they are dyslexic or have any other learning difference. Learning to read, write and spell with Silent Elephant “e” is a given.

If you are considering purchasing Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e”, now is the time.

When you have Silent Elephant “e”, you have all of your step-by-step, thoroughly researched lesson plans at your fingertips and with the online 9-hour workshop you can relax and know you will truly be ready to enjoy teaching with Silent Elephant “e” as right before your eyes you watch every child having fun rapidly and easily learning what just a short time ago, they struggled with.

Here’s another bonus!

When you purchase Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e” and become a tutor, you will have our support as you set up your business and begin tutoring.

Further, I will share:

·       What I have learned about becoming and being a tutor

·       My tutoring agreement form letter that outlines my expectations for parents and for students and my goals for my students

·       My form letter that I give to parents at the end of a school year showing their child’s progress as demonstrated by their child’s recorded assessment results

·       The opportunity to be a member of a closed Facebook group to answer questions and learn from each other on a weekly basis.

·       What I have learned about the tax advantages of having a home-based tutoring business.

(See our workshop page) 

I whole-heartedly love tutoring each and every one of my students with Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e”! 😊

As the saying goes: “once a teacher, always a teacher” is true for me. I can’t think of anything more rewarding to do in my retirement years than tutoring my students! I love them all and am so proud of their progress! I would love it if you would read some of their parents’ testimonials on my website.

AND, MY FRIENDS, I HAVE TO END WITH THIS:

If YOU became a tutor, WE would be one step closer to fulfilling my dream to help ALL children become confident, successful readers, writers and spellers! This is a very exciting thought!

Get together a group of friends who are interested in becoming a Silent Elephant “e” tutor to share the $1000 cost of the 9-hour on-line personal training class. Have FUN learning together!

If you are questioning whether Silent Elephant “e” is the comprehensive reading, writing and spelling program you’d like to purchase, feel free to contact us.

Linda Katherine Smith-Jones                            Nina Henson

Not JUST a Picture Book - MY AWESOME GRANDMA

MY AWESOME GRANDMA

In my last blog post, I shared the educational reasons and “power” of my Silent Elephant “e” posters. 

I want to let you know that included with the purchase of Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e”’s posters is My Awesome Grandma picture book. 

Just like my posters, My Awesome Grandma is not “just a pretty face”! I wrote it to engage children in a fun, educational, magical story promoting instant recall of the magic of consonant digraphs. 

I had an incredible time creating this story and collaborating with Brandin Hurley, the illustrator, determining exactly what the book should look like page by page.  

Just as I did with my Silent Elephant “e” posters, I wrote My Awesome Grandma to make the vague concept of consonant digraphs “tangible”. It can be confusing when 2 or 3 letters are combined and given a sound that is completely different from any of the individual letter sounds children learn in preschool and Kindergarten. Now, a child must disassociate their original learning of those letters’ individual sounds and give these new “sets” of letters their own unique sounds.  

As I began to ponder activities to help my students get a solid grasp of consonant digraphs, I kept falling back on my own love of the “magic” of these letters that could join together and produce totally different sounds. 

This made me smile. As I pondered further, the story of My Awesome Grandma emerged. 

Through this “magical” story and the activities I created to go with it, my students develop a firm knowledge that when you put two or three particular consonants together to form a consonant digraph, they magically make a new sound—their own unique sound.  Yes, consonant digraphs are MAGICAL!  

And so is Grandma! 

Brightly painted whimsical drawings of Grandma’s childhood accomplishments and her dream of becoming a dancer with the Rockettes draw children into this amusing story. 

Unfortunately, Grandma wasn’t tall enough to be a Rockette, and as this reality set in, she took it upon herself to do the only thing logical, to study magic with the hopes that one day she would be able to magically make herself taller. 

In the meantime, Grandma became a teacher and unexpectedly found her magic skills were especially useful in her classroom. (Wouldn’t they be!!) 

Then one fateful day, while performing magic during after school hours to prevent her students’ disappointment in the outcomes of some of their science experiments, her grandson, Andrew, unexpectedly discovers that Grandma can actually change one animal into another! 

At first Andrew is frightened, but soon his imagination goes wild as he “sees” ALL of the possibilities of Grandma’s magical skills! He makes a request of Grandma - to make him the tallest boy in the world, which has exciting and startling outcomes! 

As I mentioned in my post about my posters, My Awesome Grandma and the activities written for it activate all parts of the brain making it easier for children to develop automatic recall of all consonant digraphs. 

Children enthusiastically participate in the follow-up activities—animal mask making, play-acting using a magic hat, a magic wand, the animal masks and orange, alphabet letters that magically change their individual consonant sounds into consonant digraph sounds. The playfulness of these activities and the happiness experienced by children promote immediate recall and ensures long-term retention of the story and consonant digraphs. 

With the use of the story and activities around the story, children relax and enjoy the “magic” of something becoming something different. They let their imagination play and they let consonant digraphs “make sense” in the process.

For more information about My Awesome Grandma, feel free to contact us. You can purchase My Awesome Grandma separately. Click here for the store.

Linda Katherine Smith-Jones                            Nina Henson

Silent Elephant “e” Posters are Not JUST for Their Good Looks!

Silent Elephant “e” Posters are Not JUST for Their Good Looks!

I was recently asked, “Why should I buy Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e”’s posters?” 

My Silent Elephant “e” posters may seem like an “after thought” to make Silent Elephant “e” “prettier”, and although they do make Silent Elephant “e” “prettier”, there are solid educational reasons and research behind each and every one of the 44 posters I created. 

One of the most powerful educational reasons is that ALL children, especially dyslexics, ELL/ESL or any student with a learning difference, need colorful, visual, kinesthetic, concrete methods using stories, plays, puppets, magic, games and tangible items such as food, clay, and personal drawings and personal writing in order to make concepts clearly conceptual and comprehensible. Further, concepts visually represented through drawings using bright, vibrant colors activate parts of the brain to develop automatic recall of the concepts represented. 

Although this is true of any concept being presented, it’s especially true of vague, abstract, intangible concepts such as phonics rules. Without personal interaction with phonics rules, learners find them difficult to comprehend and remember, and as new rules are always being introduced, the concepts they are trying unsuccessfully to understand begin to stack up. The learner will begin to feel like the process is hopeless.     

Children learning through Silent Elephant “e” draw upon their five senses and whole body to understand the relationship of a phonics rule to its application in reading words. 

In Silent Elephant “e” the phonics rules are represented visually on large posters using bright, lively color. To further activate the brain, each poster is presented with written stories, skits and whole body, multi-sensory activities that involve the learner even more deeply with the concept. The vagueness slips away, and the learner is developing something “tangible” to hold in his/her memory.  

With Silent Elephant “e” each phonics rule is introduced by a teacher led fun, exciting, multi-sensory, memorable learning experiences utilizing the posters.  

Following this whole-body experience, children draw their own poster pulling into play their kinesthetic muscle memory furthering their automatic recall of the information contained on the poster. At this point the phonic rule is tangible and they have muscle, visual and story memory to fall back on as they read. 

Continuing and reinforcing their clarity and understanding of the rule and how to utilize it in their reading, the children take their poster home to share with their parents as part of the home-school connection built into the Silent Elephant “e” program. They are always eager to share both their artwork and their knowledge.  

As they continue to move through Silent Elephant “e”, it appears that my students have memorized the posters and they have. However, it is much more than memorization. They have internalized the concepts; they’ve learned them. They now own the phonics rule.

From this point on whenever they approach an unknown word, they can “fall back” on their knowledge of the concept story, activities and their personal visualization of the poster giving them self-confidence to fluently decode the words. 

I watched Jamie demonstrate his knowledge of the hard and soft “c” and “g” phonics rule when decoding an unknown word. He paused a moment to draw in the air with his index finger the digital number 2 that he drew on his poster while visualizing where the vowels go on his imaginary 2. He then quickly and accurately decoded the word. 

Ten-year-old Alex took his knowledge into his classroom. He drew from memory the content of Silent Elephant “e” posters to share with classmates to help them understand a phonetic rule they were struggling to remember. 

I use these vibrant colored posters everyday while tutoring students from home. I have some posters displayed all of the time and pull out others when needed by an individual child to focus on his/her specific lesson. 

How you display them depends on your particular needs TO DIFFERENTIATE INSTRUCTION. You can:

·       Display all posters all of the time

·       Display particular posters for as long as your students need them

·       Display only the ones you are using for a particular lesson 

However you choose to display the posters, I guarantee your children will not only enjoy them, but will frequently gaze at them to solidify their phonetic concepts becoming a part of them. 

So, you see, my Silent Elephant “e” posters were not an “after thought” but instead are a vital part of my program that engages the whole learner to ensure success.   

To check out 5 examples of my Silent Elephant “e” posters, click here https://www.silentelephante.com/program/. 

For those of you curious about the content of each poster, I have included a detailed description below. The description shares the content of the posters and the part of Silent Elephant “e” they were created for.  

Posters 1 & 2: Visual representation of Silent Elephant “e”’s content guiding children and adults to form a broad understanding of the program’s topics and how each skill will relate and connect to another 

Posters 3-9: Use with Parts 3-14: Short vowels; Visual image of how the jaw moves when making the short vowel sounds; Illustrations of my spider plant story to use throughout the program for all suffix lessons 

Posters 10-11: Use with Parts 5-14: Consonant blends; Three sounds of the suffix -ed 

Posters 12-16: Use with Parts 6-14: Words ending with double consonants; ô sound; Long double “oo”; Short double “oo”  

Posters 17-24: Use with Parts 7-14: Silent Elephant “e” words 

Posters 25-28: Use with Parts 8-14: /oi/ sound; “C” and “G” Game boards 

Poster 29: Use with Parts 9-14: The “Band-Aid” Sound of /ou/  

Poster 30: Use with Parts 6-14: “y” at the end of words 

Posters 31-33: Use with Parts 11-14: R-controlled vowels 

Posters 34-37: Use with Parts 12-14: 6 Sounds of “ou”; “al” Words; 5 Ways to Make ô; 6 Sounds of “ie” and “ei”  

Posters 38-44: Use with Parts 13-14: Dividing words into syllables

As always, we are happy to answer your questions through emails or on the phone! We’re always eager to visit with you.

If you have further questions about Silent Elephant “e”’s posters, feel free to contact us.

Linda Katherine Smith-Jones                            Nina Henson