Transform Your Struggling Reader Into a Confident Learner

Evidence-Based Reading Intervention Using Orton-Gillingham & Structured Literacy in Morgan Hill & Campbell

Watching your child struggle with reading is heartbreaking. You've noticed them avoiding books, falling behind classmates, or experiencing frustration during homework time.

Maybe their teacher has mentioned concerns about phonics, spelling, or reading fluency. Perhaps you've wondered if dyslexia might be an issue, or you're simply searching for answers about why reading feels so hard for your child.

At Mind By Design in Campbell and Morgan Hill, we understand the worry that comes with these challenges. Our specialized literacy support program transforms struggling readers into confident learners through evidence-based, multi-sensory reading intervention. Unlike traditional tutoring that simply re-teaches the same material, our approach uses Science of Reading principles and proven methods like Orton-Gillingham to build the foundational skills your child needs to succeed.

What makes our program different is our holistic approach that addresses not just reading mechanics, but also the emotional experience of struggling with literacy. We create a fun, engaging environment where children feel safe to make mistakes and celebrate progress. Our reading specialists work with students in grades K-5 and beyond, tailoring instruction to each child's unique learning profile. Parents throughout the South Bay trust us because we don't just help children read better; we help them rediscover the joy of learning and build confidence that extends far beyond the page.

Our Services

Watching your child struggle with reading is heartbreaking.

You've noticed them avoiding books, falling behind classmates, or experiencing frustration during homework time. Maybe their teacher has mentioned concerns about phonics, spelling, or reading fluency. Perhaps you've wondered if dyslexia might be an issue, or you're simply searching for answers about why reading feels so hard for your child.

At Mind By Design in Campbell and Morgan Hill, we understand the worry that comes with these challenges. Our specialized literacy support program transforms struggling readers into confident learners through evidence-based, multi-sensory reading intervention. Unlike traditional tutoring that simply re-teaches the same material, our approach uses Science of Reading principles and proven methods like Orton-Gillingham to build the foundational skills your child needs to succeed.

What makes our program different is our holistic approach that addresses not just reading mechanics, but also the emotional experience of struggling with literacy. We create a fun, engaging environment where children feel safe to make mistakes and celebrate progress. Our reading specialists work with students in grades K-5 and beyond, tailoring instruction to each child's unique learning profile. Parents throughout the South Bay trust us because we don't just help children read better; we help them rediscover the joy of learning and build confidence that extends far beyond the page.

Help Your Child Become a Confident Reader Today

Start Reading Intervention

Key Benefits

Every child who walks through our doors in Campbell or Morgan Hill is unique, with their own learning profile, strengths, and areas for growth. We reject one-size-fits-all approaches to reading instruction. Instead, our literacy specialists conduct comprehensive assessments to understand exactly where your child is in their literacy development and what specific skills need attention. This individualized approach means we're not wasting time on skills your child has already mastered or overwhelming them with concepts they're not ready for.
Our specialists view your child as a whole person, not just a collection of reading deficits. We consider their interests, their learning preferences, their emotional relationship with reading, and their overall development. If your child loves dinosaurs, we'll incorporate that interest into reading activities. If they're tactile learners, we'll use sand trays and letter tiles. If reading has become a source of anxiety, we'll focus on building confidence alongside skills. This comprehensive view allows us to design an intervention that resonates with your child personally.
Parents throughout the South Bay appreciate that our individualized approach extends to communication as well. We keep you informed about your child's progress, share strategies you can use at home, and adjust our approach based on what we're seeing in sessions. You're not just dropping your child off for tutoring; you're partnering with specialists who genuinely care about your child's success and are committed to finding the approaches that work specifically for them. This personalized attention is what transforms struggling readers into confident learners who believe in their own abilities.
Our deep expertise in literacy and language development means we're prepared to support children with a wide range of learning profiles. Whether your child has been diagnosed with dyslexia, dysgraphia, or other language-related challenges, or whether you're still trying to understand why reading is difficult, our specialists have the training and experience to help. Our team includes professionals who have worked extensively within public education systems, giving us insider knowledge of how schools identify and support struggling readers.
For families in Campbell and Morgan Hill dealing with dyslexia concerns, our Orton-Gillingham-trained specialists use approaches specifically designed for students with language-based learning differences. The Orton-Gillingham methodology is considered the gold standard for dyslexia intervention, and our multi-sensory, structured approach has helped countless children with dyslexia become successful readers. We also support children with attention difficulties, processing challenges, and those who simply need extra support to build foundational skills that may have gaps.
What makes our program particularly effective for diverse learners is our ability to adapt. If a particular approach isn't clicking, we pivot. If your child needs more repetition in one area and can move faster in another, we adjust the pacing. Our specialists are trained to recognize the subtle signs that indicate when a child is frustrated, overwhelmed, or ready for a challenge. This flexibility, combined with evidence-based methods, ensures that students with various learning profiles all find success. Parents seeking specialized reading support in the South Bay area find that our expertise with diverse learners provides the targeted help their children need to overcome specific challenges and build genuine literacy skills.
One of the most important, and often overlooked, aspects of reading intervention is making it enjoyable. Many struggling readers have developed anxiety around books and literacy tasks. They associate reading with failure, frustration, and feeling "less than" their peers. Breaking through these negative associations requires creating experiences where learning feels engaging, rewarding, and yes, fun. This is a cornerstone of our approach at Mind By Design's Campbell and Morgan Hill locations.
Our literacy specialists are skilled at transforming essential skill-building into activities that children genuinely enjoy. We incorporate games, movement, art, and hands-on manipulatives into every session. Children might be learning complex phonics patterns, but to them, it feels like playing a detective game to crack the code of words. They're building spelling skills while using colored markers to map out word structures visually. They're improving reading fluency by reading passages about topics they find fascinating. The multi-sensory nature of our Orton-Gillingham approach naturally lends itself to engaging activities that keep children interested and motivated.
When learning is enjoyable, everything changes. Children arrive at sessions eager rather than resistant. They're willing to try challenging tasks because they trust the process will be interesting. They persevere through difficult concepts because the overall experience is positive. Parents consistently tell us they've noticed their children becoming more confident not just about reading, but about learning in general. This shift in mindset, from "I can't do this" to "This is challenging, but I can figure it out", is often the breakthrough moment that leads to accelerated progress. For families in the South Bay area, our commitment to making literacy intervention fun means their children develop not just reading skills, but a positive relationship with learning that serves them throughout their educational journey.

Reading is not a single skill but a complex integration of multiple abilities working together. Many tutoring programs focus narrowly on one area, perhaps phonics or comprehension, without addressing how all literacy components connect. At Mind By Design, our programs don't simply focus on one area or skill. We intentionally connect and integrate speaking, reading, spelling, pronunciation, comprehension, and writing, recognizing that strength in one area supports development in others.
Our holistic approach means that during a single session, your child might practice segmenting words into sounds (phonemic awareness), connect those sounds to letter patterns (phonics), read words in context (fluency), discuss the meaning of what they've read (comprehension), and then practice spelling words with the patterns they've learned (encoding). This integration reinforces learning at multiple levels and helps children understand the relationships between different literacy skills. We use Science of Reading-based practices and explicit skill building with a multi-sensory approach to learning that engages visual, auditory, and kinesthetic pathways simultaneously.
For parents in Campbell and Morgan Hill seeking comprehensive reading support, this holistic development approach means you're not addressing symptoms while ignoring root causes. If your child struggles with spelling, we examine their phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge. If they have trouble with reading comprehension, we look at their vocabulary, fluency, and background knowledge. We consider the whole literacy picture and design an intervention that builds a strong, interconnected foundation. This comprehensive approach leads to more sustainable progress and ensures that improvements in one area translate to improvements across all aspects of literacy. It's the difference between temporary fixes and lasting transformation.
A key element that distinguishes our literacy intervention from traditional tutoring is our use of the speech-to-print approach. Instead of starting with abstract letters and asking children to memorize their sounds, we begin with what children already know, the sounds they use every day when speaking. We teach students to recognize the relationship between the sounds in their spoken language and the letters that represent those sounds on the page. This approach builds on your child's existing verbal and phonological abilities, creating a bridge to reading proficiency.
The speech-to-print methodology is particularly effective for struggling readers because it makes the alphabetic code logical rather than arbitrary. Children learn that reading is essentially "speech written down." They discover that they can use what they already know about language to decode written words. We explicitly teach them to connect sounds to spelling patterns, rules, and conventions. This understanding fundamentally changes how they approach reading; instead of guessing or relying solely on visual memory, they have systematic strategies for figuring out unfamiliar words.
For families in Morgan Hill and Campbell, this means your child is learning to read in a way that makes sense to them. The speech-to-print approach is backed by decades of research in the Science of Reading and is particularly effective for students with dyslexia and other language-based learning differences. It transforms reading from a mysterious, frustrating task into a systematic process that can be understood and mastered. Our specialists are trained in implementing this approach through explicit, systematic instruction that moves from simple to complex, ensuring your child builds a solid foundation before moving to more advanced skills. This methodology is one of the reasons families throughout the South Bay see such significant progress in our literacy program.
Reading development follows a predictable sequence, and effective intervention respects this progression. Our literacy program takes a structured, evidence-based approach to building your child's awareness of words and grasping their connection to sounds. From phonemic to morphological skills, we systematically develop each of the key components of language that influence fluency with reading and writing. This sequential approach ensures that no critical foundational skill is skipped or assumed.
We begin where your child is, not where a curriculum says they should be. If phonemic awareness skills need strengthening, we start there, using explicit instruction and multi-sensory activities to build their ability to manipulate sounds in words. Once those foundations are solid, we move to phonics, teaching sound-symbol relationships in a systematic sequence. As phonics skills develop, we introduce increasingly complex spelling patterns, syllable types, and morphology (prefixes, suffixes, and roots). Throughout this progression, we're simultaneously building fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, ensuring that decoding skills translate to meaningful reading.
Our step-by-step approach incorporates evidence-based strategies, including the Orton-Gillingham method, Word Study, and Structured Word Inquiry, all proven approaches for building foundational literacy skills. These methods are particularly effective because they're cumulative and systematic. Each new skill builds on previously mastered skills, creating a strong, interconnected knowledge base. For parents in Campbell and Morgan Hill, this structured progression means you can clearly see your child's advancement. There's no vague "we're working on reading"; instead, you'll understand exactly which skills your child has mastered and what we're targeting next. This transparency, combined with proven methods, gives families confidence that their child is receiving intervention that will create lasting change.

Our Service Categories

The foundation of reading success begins with phonemic awareness, the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. Our specialists provide explicit instruction in segmenting words into sounds, blending sounds to form words, and manipulating phonemes through multi-sensory activities. We then systematically teach phonics, the relationships between sounds and letters, using structured, sequential instruction that builds from simple to complex patterns. Students learn consonants, short vowels, digraphs, blends, long vowels, r-controlled vowels, and advanced patterns in a logical progression. This foundational work is essential for students in Campbell and Morgan Hill who struggle with decoding and creates the basis for all future literacy development.
Once basic decoding skills are in place, we focus on building reading fluency, the ability to read accurately, at an appropriate pace, and with proper expression. Fluent reading frees up cognitive resources for comprehension, allowing students to focus on meaning rather than laboriously decoding each word. Our specialists use proven techniques, including repeated reading, phrase-cued reading, and reader's theater, to build fluency naturally. Simultaneously, we develop comprehension skills through explicit instruction in vocabulary, inference, main idea identification, and text structure analysis. For South Bay families, this dual focus ensures that children don't just learn to decode words; they become true readers who understand and enjoy what they read.
Reading and spelling are reciprocal skills; understanding how to decode words helps with encoding them, and vice versa. Our literacy program systematically teaches spelling through the same phonics patterns and rules students learn for reading. We use multi-sensory techniques to help students internalize spelling patterns, and we explicitly teach spelling rules and conventions that bring order to English orthography. Writing instruction is integrated throughout, with students applying their growing spelling and phonics knowledge to express their ideas on paper. We address letter formation, sentence structure, paragraph organization, and written expression, recognizing that writing proficiency reinforces and extends reading skills. This integrated approach gives Campbell and Morgan Hill students comprehensive literacy skills.
The Orton-Gillingham approach is recognized as the gold standard for teaching students with dyslexia and other language-based learning differences, and it's highly effective for all struggling readers. This multi-sensory, structured, sequential methodology explicitly teaches the connections between sounds, letters, and words. Our Orton-Gillingham-trained specialists provide direct, systematic instruction that engages visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile learning pathways simultaneously. Students might trace letters in sand while saying their sounds, build words with letter tiles while segmenting phonemes, or use color-coding to identify syllable types. This multi-sensory approach creates stronger neural pathways and helps students retain what they learn. For families seeking specialized reading support in the South Bay, our Orton-Gillingham expertise provides proven intervention for even the most challenged readers.
We recognize that literacy intervention looks different for a kindergartener just beginning to read versus a middle schooler who has struggled for years. Our program offers age-appropriate literacy support with specialists who concentrate on specific age ranges. Younger students in grades K-2 work with specialists who focus on building phonemic awareness, early phonics skills, and a love of reading through playful, engaging, hands-on instruction. Older students from age 12 and up work with specialists who understand the unique challenges of remediating literacy skills while maintaining age-appropriate dignity and interest. These sessions focus on improving existing literacy ability, building vocabulary knowledge, enhancing writing skills, and learning compensatory strategies. This tailored approach ensures that Campbell and Morgan Hill students receive intervention that matches their developmental stage and specific needs.

Our Process

STEP ONE

Connect with Our Team

Your journey toward literacy success begins with a conversation. Contact our Campbell or Morgan Hill office by phone at 669-282-2510 or through our website to schedule a free initial consultation call. During this call, you'll speak with our Client Relations Specialist who will take time to understand your child's current reading challenges, their educational history, and what concerns have brought you to seek support. We'll discuss what you've noticed at home, what feedback you've received from teachers, and what your goals are for your child. This is also your opportunity to ask questions about our program, our approach, and our specialists. There's no pressure, just a supportive conversation about how we might help. This initial connection typically takes 20-30 minutes and helps us determine whether our literacy intervention program is the right fit for your child's specific needs.

STEP TWO

Conduct Initial Literacy Assessment

Before we can design an effective intervention, we need to understand exactly where your child is in their literacy development. We conduct a comprehensive literacy screening that examines phonemic awareness, phonics knowledge, reading fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and spelling skills. This assessment is conducted in a comfortable, supportive environment by one of our reading specialists and typically takes 60-90 minutes. For some families, we may review in-depth testing that has already been completed by schools or other professionals. Based on these assessment results, we create a detailed roadmap of your child's strengths and areas for growth. We then meet with you to review the findings, answer your questions, and explain our recommendations for intervention. This assessment phase ensures that we're targeting exactly the right skills and using our session time as efficiently as possible to create meaningful progress for your South Bay student.

STEP THREE

Build a Custom Literacy Plan

With assessment results in hand, our specialists design an individualized literacy intervention plan specifically for your child. This plan identifies which foundational skills need attention, which evidence-based strategies we'll use, and how we'll structure sessions to maximize learning. We determine the appropriate frequency and duration of sessions, typically meeting 1-3 times per week, depending on your child's needs and your family's schedule. For students whose reading struggles are impacting school performance, we collaborate with their teachers (with your permission) to ensure our intervention supports and reinforces classroom learning. We also identify ways you can support literacy development at home. This customized plan becomes our roadmap, though we remain flexible and adjust as needed based on your child's progress and response to intervention.

STEP FOUR

Begin One-on-One Literacy Sessions

Your child begins working with their assigned reading specialist in focused, engaging one-on-one sessions at our Campbell or Morgan Hill location. Each session follows a structured format that typically includes phonemic awareness activities, phonics instruction with multi-sensory practice, reading fluency work, and writing/spelling practice, all integrated in a way that feels engaging rather than tedious. Sessions last 45-60 minutes and incorporate games, manipulatives, movement, and activities tailored to your child's interests and learning style. Our specialists take detailed notes on progress and areas of difficulty, using this information to adjust instruction in real time and plan future sessions. After sessions, you'll receive brief updates on what was covered and suggestions for practice at home.

STEP FIVE

Monitor Progress & Celebrate Growth

Throughout the intervention process, we continuously monitor your child's progress through both informal observation and periodic assessment. You'll receive regular progress updates, and we schedule formal progress review meetings every 8-12 weeks to share detailed information about skills mastered, areas of ongoing focus, and recommendations for next steps. We celebrate milestones with your child, whether that's mastering a new phonics pattern, reading their first chapter book, or spelling words they couldn't before. These celebrations reinforce progress and build confidence. As your child's skills strengthen, we adjust the intervention plan, potentially decreasing session frequency or transitioning focus to more advanced skills. Our goal is not to create dependency but to build independence, to give your child the literacy skills and confidence to succeed in school and beyond. For families in Campbell and Morgan Hill, this comprehensive process provides a clear path from struggle to success.

Our Approach

Our approach to literacy intervention is grounded in decades of research about how children learn to read and what works for struggling readers.

We embrace the Science of Reading, a vast body of research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and education science that tells us reading is not a natural process that children simply "pick up" with exposure to books. Instead, reading must be explicitly taught through systematic instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. This research-based foundation distinguishes our program from balanced literacy or whole language approaches that have left many children behind.

What makes our implementation of these principles unique is our team's deep background in educational psychology and public school experience. Our specialists understand not just the theory of literacy development but the practical realities of how reading challenges manifest in children's daily lives. We've seen firsthand how struggling readers develop anxiety, avoidance behaviors, and negative self-perceptions. That's why our approach addresses both the cognitive skills and the emotional experience of literacy challenges. We create a safe, supportive environment where mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities and where effort is celebrated as much as achievement. This dual focus on skills and emotions is what allows Campbell and Morgan Hill students to make genuine progress.

Our literacy program is inherently multi-sensory, following the Orton-Gillingham philosophy that engaging multiple pathways strengthens learning. Students don't just see letters; they trace them while saying their sounds, build them with manipulatives while segmenting phonemes, and write them while applying spelling rules. This simultaneous visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile input creates stronger neural connections and helps information move into long-term memory. We make this multi-sensory instruction feel natural and fun rather than repetitive or boring, incorporating games, movement, and hands-on activities that keep children engaged.

Finally, our approach is truly individualized and responsive. While we follow evidence-based scope and sequences, we're constantly adjusting based on what we observe. If a child is flying through phonics instruction but struggling with fluency, we adjust the balance. If anxiety is interfering with progress, we slow down and focus on building confidence. If a particular multi-sensory technique isn't resonating, we try a different approach. This flexibility, combined with systematic instruction, ensures that each child in our Campbell and Morgan Hill literacy program receives exactly what they need to become a confident, capable reader. We're not following a script; we're using our professional expertise to guide each unique child toward literacy success.

Frequently Asked Questions

Mind By Design was founded by Jana Parker to provide comprehensive educational and psychological services to children and families in the South Bay community. Our team of Licensed Educational Psychologists, speech-language pathologists, and education specialists all bring backgrounds working within public schools, giving us unique insight into the challenges families face navigating the educational system. We combine this experience with specialized training in evidence-based interventions to provide assessment and support services in an approachable way that reduces worry and inspires growth. Based in Campbell and Morgan Hill, we're dedicated to helping children with unique learning needs thrive both in school and in life.

Learn More

While a comprehensive psychoeducational evaluation can provide valuable information, you don't need a formal evaluation to begin literacy intervention. We conduct our own literacy assessment as part of the onboarding process to understand your child's specific strengths and areas for growth. This screening gives us the information we need to design an effective intervention. However, if your child has complex learning challenges, if you're considering requesting school services, or if you want to know whether dyslexia or another learning disability is present, a comprehensive evaluation may be beneficial. Our team includes Licensed Educational Psychologists who can conduct thorough assessments, and we're happy to discuss whether an evaluation would be helpful during your initial consultation. For many Campbell and Morgan Hill families, starting with our literacy assessment and intervention is the right first step.
Every child is different, but most families begin noticing changes within the first 8-12 weeks of consistent intervention. Early improvements often include increased willingness to try reading, better phonemic awareness, and improved accuracy with phonics skills. More substantial gains in reading fluency and comprehension typically emerge after 4-6 months of regular sessions. Students with significant gaps or those with dyslexia may need 1-2 years of intervention to fully remediate their skills. The key factors affecting progress timeline include the severity of the initial challenges, consistency of attendance, practice between sessions, and whether any underlying learning disabilities are present. During our initial consultation and after assessment, we'll give you a realistic timeframe based on your child's specific profile. What we can promise is that every session is productive and moving your child forward on their literacy journey.
Traditional tutoring often involves re-teaching material from school using the same approaches that didn't work the first time. Our literacy intervention is fundamentally different; we use specialized, evidence-based methodologies specifically designed for struggling readers. We employ the Orton-Gillingham approach, Structured Word Inquiry, and other Science of Reading-based practices that explicitly teach the foundational skills many struggling readers lack. Our specialists are trained in educational psychology and literacy development, not just subject matter. We conduct detailed assessments to identify exactly which skills need attention, and we use multi-sensory instruction that engages multiple learning pathways. Perhaps most importantly, we address the whole child, building confidence and reducing anxiety while systematically developing literacy skills. For Campbell and Morgan Hill families, this means intervention that creates lasting change rather than just helping with this week's homework.
Literacy intervention is generally considered an educational service rather than a medical service, so it's typically not covered by insurance. However, some families have successfully used FSA (Flexible Spending Account) or HSA (Health Savings Account) funds to pay for literacy services, especially when there's a diagnosed learning disability. We provide detailed invoices that families can submit for potential reimbursement. We also offer various payment options to make our services accessible. During your initial consultation, we'll be transparent about costs and work with you to create a schedule that fits your budget while still providing the intensity of intervention your child needs. Many families find that investing in specialized literacy intervention now prevents years of struggle and potential expense for remediation later. We're happy to discuss the financial aspects during our initial conversation.
Our literacy program is specifically designed to support students with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and other language-based learning differences. Our use of the Orton-Gillingham approach and structured, multi-sensory instruction makes our program highly effective for students with diagnosed learning disabilities. Our team includes specialists with extensive experience working with diverse learners, and our founder, Jana Parker, is a Licensed Educational Psychologist and Board Certified School Neuropsychologist with expertise in learning disabilities. If your child has a diagnosis, we'll design an intervention that addresses their specific profile. If you suspect a learning disability but don't have a diagnosis, we can conduct a comprehensive psychoeducational evaluation to determine if dyslexia or another condition is present. Either way, our Morgan Hill and Campbell literacy program provides the specialized, evidence-based support that helps students with learning differences become successful readers. These children often need a different approach to learn to read, and that's exactly what we provide.

START YOUR CHILD'S JOURNEY TO READING CONFIDENCE TODAY

Join Campbell and Morgan Hill families who have transformed their struggling readers into confident learners.