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Hettie Johnson Institute

 

The Hettie Johnson Institute at Spring Valley

TRANSFORM TEACHING. TRANSFORM LEARNING. TRANSFORM LIVES. 
By offering the finest in dyslexia and learning disability education, teacher training, as well as parent and student support services, The Hettie Johnson Institute at Spring Valley aspires to make a difference to learning and teaching in the state of Alabama. Look into online resources and upcoming community events by following the links below.
 

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Dyslexia Therapy with HJI

At The Hettie Johnson Institute, we use Basic Language Skills from The Neuhaus Education Center for dyslexia therapy.  In the sessions, we focus on multiple skills to build the necessary foundation for reading. Both virtual and in-person formats are available.  

Basic Language Skills is a structured literacy course exploring the Science of Reading with explicit, systematic, sequential, intensive, and comprehensive instruction. The Hettie Johnson Institute utilizes The Neuhaus Education Center’s’ Tier III program in all of our Dyslexia Therapy lessons. This multisensory, Orton-Gillingham-based curriculum is recognized by the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) and accredited by the International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council (IMSLEC). All students receive intensive instruction in phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, oral language, comprehension, grammar, and written composition specifically designed for students with dyslexia and related learning differences.

All of our dyslexia specialists are CALTs (Certified Academic Language Therapist), CALPs (Certified Academic Language Practitioner), or are in the process of obtaining one of those distinctions. To become a therapist, one has completed 200 hours of intensive instruction and has accumulated 700 hours of teaching these specific skills, among other requirements.

PROGRAM DIRECTOR: 

Rachel Shank
Certified Academic Language Therapist
rshank@springvalleyschool.org

PROGRAM LOCATION: 

Spring Valley School
2701 Sydney Drive
Birmingham, AL 35211

Hettie Johnson's Blog

"You may have read a recent article about Mississippi schools’ success, however, the current article from Harvard is light-years more complete and powerful to teach overall literacy skills.

Now that I realize that the Mississippi program, while it has been very successful, focuses on phonics, which is huge and necessary, it doesn’t include morphology, syntactic, vocabulary, and background knowledge.

An excellent teacher would incorporate these pieces naturally but those who strictly follow the phonics piece of the MS article would miss the boat because even if you can decode words perfectly, you won’t comprehend if you lack the vocabulary & sufficient background knowledge." - Hettie Johnson, MA, CCC-SLP

Read More about Recommended Resource: A Right Way To Read?