Tutoring, Teacher Training and Outreach
Whether we are training teachers to get the most out of our programs, tutoring students to get the results they need, or deploying our programs abroad, Reading Roots Literacy is making a difference.
We offer services to work one-on-one with readers in the Calgary area, using our program and decades of experience to get results
We offer seminars and mentoring to make sure your classroom, school, or district, is teaching reading the right way with our programs.
Jenny’s programs are ideal for tutoring. Jenny lives in the Northwest of Calgary and has been tutoring from her home since retiring from teaching. Her programs are ideal for Kindergarten to Grade three. Students are first given a diagnostic assessment with a parent in attendance. Jenny then determines their needs and develops a program. Students are tutored once a week in a one hour session with parents in attendance so they can learn how to help their children at home. They are given materials to work with at home, including boards with magnetic letters and books at the student’s ready level for daily reading. Parents are amazed at the progress of their children.
The new Phonics and pronunciation program has been developed for older students, especially English as an Additional Language (EAL) students. The program is a condensed version of the Sprouts and Roots programs with extra pages more appropriate for older students. People having problems with pronouncing English words need to start at the very beginning learning the sounds of the alphabet and practicing blending and segmenting them. They read the storyboards because many of the most difficult words to pronounce are common words like “the” and “is”.
In 2025, Jenny had fun working with her EAL neighbours, the parents and their two teenage daughters, while she was developing the new program. This helped her add word lists of words that give the most problems to EAL learners. After the parents and teenagers graduated from the program, Jenny began working with their five year old daughter. Her programs work for people of all ages!
The seeds of Jenny’s career in teaching students and teachers began when she was a first year teacher. Before she began she went to a week long seminar given by Mrs. Anna Ingham, an experienced Grade One teacher. Jenny was so grateful to learn about how to teach reading with a blended sound-sight method the summer before she began her career. She had amazing success with her Grade One students in a Grades 1-4 classroom in a two-room country school.
Now Jenny is a disciple of Mrs. Ingham and loves being a teacher trainer. She began training teachers over 25 years ago when she developed her final version of the Joe and Joan program. She would give week long seminars in the summer for her school district, sharing her programs and explaining how to use a blended sound-sight method. Classroom management is a big component of her seminars.
She began to give seminars all over Alberta, even after she retired. In 2011 she developed the Sprouts and Roots Programs which are organized differently and more suited for tutoring but also good programs to use in classrooms.
After Jenny retired she started going to Cambodia in 2013 to donate her programs and help teachers implement them. She has gone there almost every year since, and feels energized and appreciated when she is there. She also enjoys the weather! In 2015 she developed videos to help the EAL teachers with their EAL students. The videos are also helpful for teachers who may not have confidence in teaching reading using a systematic, explicit phonics method, blended with levelled books and rich literature.
In 2025, seeing a need for helping older students and adults with pronunciation, Jenny developed the Phonics and Pronunciation Program for EAL students and older students who may still need help with reading. This program has been very well received in Cambodia and would be beneficial for EAL students everywhere.
Jenny is still happy to give seminars to help teachers get started with her programs. Schools may contact Jenny to make arrangements.
In 2013 Jenny and her husband Garth went to Battambang, Cambodia, at the invitation of friends Jan and Amgad, also retired teachers. They believed the Cambodian schools needed Jenny’s programs. We began at a small school and expanded from there. Amgad and Jan organized workshops and invited other schools to attend. Now Jenny has taught thousands of Cambodian teachers to implement her programs, from the biggest schools in Battambang to small village schools. Those teacher in turn have impacted tens of thousands of students. It is very important for Cambodians to learn to speak clearly in English because it opens up so many job opportunities with tourism and other areas. For ASEAN, a group of Asian countries, their language in business is English.
Jenny and Garth love the people of Cambodia and the warm weather while we are away from Canada in the winter months. It’s like a working holiday, a second home. Not only does Jenny give workshops, she visits schools during the week to observe teachers and gives them feedback to help them improve their teaching skills. Jenny feels joyful and invigorated when she works with the beautiful people in Cambodia!
© 2026 Created and maintained by Rhettoric Media