About Me
Tara is a New York and New Jersey state certified teacher in Childhood Education (1-6) and Special Education. She earned her Master's Degree in Early Childhood and Childhood Education and is fully certified in Teaching Students with Disabilities from grades 1-6 in both states. She also holds an Orton Gillingham Teacher Certification — a multi-sensory approach designed for struggling readers and writers.
Her career began in a charter school for students with Autism, followed by work in the New York City public schools as an ICT kindergarten, ICT first grade, and self-contained special education teacher. She also served as a learning specialist for fourth grade students with learning disabilities at another charter school. With experience supporting children facing dyslexia, processing delays, comprehension challenges, and speech and language impairments, she has spent the past three years working with students from fourth through tenth grade. She currently works as a reading teacher at a private school that specializes in teaching students with learning disabilities.
Each student receives differentiated, multi-sensory lessons targeting decoding, encoding, and reading comprehension. Her reading pedagogy focuses on background knowledge, vocabulary, phonemic awareness, fluency, letter/sound identification, blending sounds, comprehension skills, and writing. Lessons draw from Orton Gillingham Multi-Sensory Teaching methods as well as concepts from Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Fountas and Pinnell, Common Core, Leveled Literacy Instruction, and Wilson Fundations curriculums.
Kind, dedicated, and approachable, she is focused on building rapport with every student — treating each child with care and as an individual, while also having fun. She is certain she will help your child grow in any area of need.
Licensed
Licensed teacher with experience at private and public schools in the states of New York and New Jersey.
Certified
Orton Gillingham Teacher Certified, working with students who need a direct, multisensory approach to decoding, encoding, and improving comprehension skills.
Passionate
Dedicated to finding a prescriptive method tailored to your child's needs.
Services
Offering individualized Orton Gillingham lessons in decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling), guided reading, fluency, reading comprehension, and writing.
Decoding
Improving the ability to apply your knowledge of letter-sound relationships, including knowledge of letter patterns, to correctly pronounce written words.
Encoding
Breaking a spoken word into its separate sounds, phonemes, you spell the word.
Guided Reading
The optimal learning for a reader occurs when they are assisted by an educator to read and understand a text with clear but limited guidance.
Fluency
Helping students write with accuracy and speed.
Reading Comprehension
Working on the ability to read text, process it, and understand its meaning.
Writing
Writing helps students recognize that they have opinions, ideas, and thoughts that are worth sharing with the world, and writing is an effective way of getting them out there.
Ages and Locations
Tutoring children from first through seventh grade in these areas:
New Jersey: North and Central New Jersey
Manhattan: Upper West Side, Midtown, Tribeca