Academic Help for Children Who Struggle

Is your child a unique learner? Unique learners often struggle to learn even though they are bright. If you’ve been looking for academic help for kids, then you’ve come to the right place.

Most likely, if your child is struggling academically, then your child is a unique learner – even if you already have a diagnosis. It’s common to have a crossover of symptoms with learning issues and learning disabilities.

Unique learners struggle more than most because they are bright verbal, and animated. People – usually adults – expect more out of them than other learners, and frustration sets in. Most unique learners are hands-on (kinesthetic) learners who are right-brain dominant, and that’s why it’s difficult to get academic help for kids.

These kids are smart, verbal, and willing to learn. The problem arises when they learn differently than their peers, when they fall a bit behind or can’t seem to stay up with the normal flow of the class.

We Cater to Unique Learners at Harp Learning Institute.

Did you know that traditional learning methodologies simply won’t work for unique learners? To be honest, traditional programs and methodologies don’t work for most kids with learning disabilities, either.

If your child is a unique learner, struggles with a learning disability, or has fallen behind academically, then you need to find a “different” way of helping. Harp Learning Institute in Lodi, California offers this to you – all at an affordable price.

At Harp, we offer academic help for kids in a way that they understand, not the other way around. It’s an avenue of direct instruction aimed at the unique learner, the learning disabled child, or any other student who has fallen behind academically.

Most of the learners who attend Harp Learning Institute are bright, intelligent students who die a slow death every day at school.  They’re also usually right-brain dominant, which means they are creative souls who learn best through whole picture learning, color, creativity, and movement. 

“If they’re interested in something, they have amazing hyper-focusing powers, but if they don’t see the value in learning, they turn off like a faucet.  They’re also hands-on, tactile learners who learn best by doing.  The modern classroom relies heavily on the lecture format these days, and because of that, these kids are lost a large portion of the day,” Lisa explains. 

Your Child Will Soar Academically From Our Program!

Kids who are tactile learners love science!  They have a natural affinity toward it, yet they get confused when science is taught to them in traditional ways. The current mode of teaching science involves reading information, answering questions about it, and then taking a test on the material.

This isn’t science; it’s reading comprehension, and this naturally frustrates these bright children. They want to get their hands dirty with science experiments. They crave deep discussions and rise to the occasion when setting up hypotheses.

But Don’t Despair!

Slowly, they turn off to not only science, but learning as well.

But don’t despair! That spark for learning can be relit.  Children naturally want to learn, and they actually take learning seriously.  Think about a day when your child had a substitute teacher where not much work was accomplished. Usually, kids are indignant about this.  They’re fully aware that they go to school to learn. 

Learning Should be Fun and Easy!

If you have a non-traditional learner or a child with a learning disability, then your child needs a different academic regime.  These kids need movement, pictures, color, crossing the mid-line of the body, auditory stimulus, patterns, and visual cues in order to make their learning foundations strong.

In addition, these children have gaps in their academic foundations and need each small component put back into place, one small piece at a time. When children with learning issues are given the proper learning route, the sky’s the limit!

Before your child can write and take notes, your child must know the sounds of each letter and how they come together to form words.  We must be sure your child’s hand is strong enough to hold and manipulate a pencil.  In addition, it’s important to be your learner is confident in spatially finding a place on a page and know how to formulate letters and numbers. 

For math, it’s important to make sure that a student knows math facts well enough to perform accurate computations. It is difficult to fill in higher-level math skills unless the building blocks of learning are in place.  That means as student can’t stop and think about what 7 x 6 would be.  He has to have automatic memory retrieval of this.  

Once a student stops to figure out a math fact, she forgets the sequence of events that need to take place to work out the actual math problem and usually comes up with the incorrect answer. 

At Harp, we know that math is sequential; you must have A to get to B and B to get to C.  We go back and make sure the student’s learning foundation doesn’t have holes in it.  We systematically go back and fill in any learning gaps the child might have.  Step-by-step, we fill in gaps with our unique, copyrighted, and research-driven methodologies. 

Teaching to Mastery

All too often, schools fail to teach to skills mastery. They teach a skill and if a student doesn’t master that skill, they just move on, hoping that somehow the student might fill in the missing gaps on his own.

This might work for a handful of children, but for those with learning issues, it’s a death sentence.  In order to put crucial academic skills back into place, the student needs to master lower-level skills.  

At Harp, we know a student can’t write with confidence and efficiency unless visual motor integration skills are strong.  That’s why we spend a lot of time on those skills in the lower levels of our program. 

Academics – A Double-edged Sword

“You can’t fix poor academics with more academics,” Lisa says.  “That’s like training every day for a marathon – only with an injured leg.”

It’s amazing how the solution to poor reading is usually a dose of more reading taught in the exact same way that didn’t work all day.

Kids Who Struggle to Learn Need Something Different to Help Them Succeed!

Non-traditional learners need non-traditional methodologies and techniques to help them learn in a way that makes sense to them. Harp Learning Institute provides your child with a unique way of reaching academic success, one that works, one that we’ve been doing for over twenty years. 

“Most of our learners are bright, intelligent students who die a slow death every day at school.  They’re usually right-brain dominant, which means they are creative souls who learn best through whole picture learning and movement.”

There’s a different way to help these kids succeed in learning, and it only takes a different approach.

Kids who are tactile learners love science! 

They have a natural affinity toward science. Yet, confusion mounts if science is taught through reading and answering questions.  This isn’t science; it’s reading comprehension.  Slowly, they turn off to not only science, but learning as well.

At Harp, we light that spark up again. Children naturally want to learn, and they actually take learning seriously.  Think about a day when your child had a substitute where they didn’t get any work done.  Usually, kids are indignant about this.  They know they go to school to learn. 

Learning Should be Fun and Easy!

If you have a non-traditional learner or a child with a learning disability, then your child needs a different academic regime.  These kids need movement, pictures, color, crossing the mid-line of the body, auditory stimulus, patterns, and visual cues.  

They need the bigger component of academics broken down into smaller sub-skills of learning so we can build those sub-skills back up into the larger skills of reading fluency, reading comprehension, and math computation. 

For math, we make sure that a student knows math facts well enough to perform accurate computations.  Higher-level math skills can’t be taught until the building blocks of learning are in place.  That means as student can’t stop and think about what 7 x 6 would be.  He has to have automatic memory retrieval of this.  

Once a student stops to figure out a math fact, she forgets the sequence of events that need to take place to work out the actual math problem and usually comes up with the incorrect answer. 

At Harp, we know that math is sequential; you must have A to get to B and B to get to C.  We go back and make sure the student’s learning foundation doesn’t have holes in it.  We systematically go back and fill in any learning gaps the child might have.  Step-by-step, we fill in gaps with our unique, research-driven methodologies.  

Academic Help for Kids at Harp Learning Institute

All too often, schools don’t teach to skills mastery.  They teach a skill and if a student doesn’t master that skill, they just move on, hoping that somehow the student might fill in the missing gaps on his/her own.

This might work for a handful of children, but for those with learning issues, it’s a death sentence.  In order to put crucial academic skills back into place, the student needs to master lower-level skills first.

Confidence is Always a Plus!

We know that your child can’t write with confidence and efficiency unless visual motor integration skills are strong.  That’s why we spend a lot of time on those skills in the lower levels of our program.  The good news?  Tests pass with flying color if your child is strong in visual motor integration skills. From there, it’s simple to move onto more difficult skills.

Helping Kids Succeed – Experience Counts!

For over twenty years, Harp Learning Institute has been helping students overcome learning differences and reach academic excellence.  Children with dyslexia have learned to read and spell through our Orton-Gillingham based Bravo! Reading System and the Harp Learning System.  Often, they surpass their current grade level.  Kids with autism have learned to speak, read, and write.  They’ve learned social skills and have a shot at a normal future.  

Kids with ADD/ADHD have learned to focus and tune out distracting noises.  They’ve learned to quit being impulsive and think before acting or writing.  Students who struggled with visual and auditory processing issues have learned to process sensory information correctly.  This led to better grades and standardized testing scores. 

After a few months of our program, students generally feel more balanced.  They attempt new tasks without fear or remorse. Confidence spikes, which carries over into academics. After that, they start doing homework independently…with less battles.  

The Academic Push

There has been a devastating push for academics in recent years, and the sadness of this is that it only hurts the kids, especially younger ones. Our sandbox kindergartens are gone, hands-on learning activities have gone by the wayside, and we have more learning disabilities than ever before.

When young learners are forced to swallow an unhealthy bite of academics, most will choke. There is a hierarchy to learning, and when the lower-level skills aren’t put into place – such as motor skills, visual motor integration, and fine motor skills – then crucial learning stages are skipped.

At Harp, we go back and fill in those gaps so your unique learner can succeed!

A Better Way of Giving Academic Help to Kids!

At Harp, we offer a lasting solution, so you don’t have to keep hiring tutors or send your child to intervention programs that don’t work.  We go to the root cause of the problem and correct it.  Whether your child has dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, autism, ADD/ADHD, or a processing disorder, we can transform your unique learner into a successful learner!