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!
Jenny is happy to provide teacher training to schools or districts that are using the Roots programs. Schools may contact Jenny to arrange workshops.
Jenny has been providing teacher training for more than thirty years. After teaching Grade 1 for many years, and developing unique programs that rapidly taught students how to sound out words, Jenny began giving workshops for all the Grade 1 teachers in her district. Then Jenny became an L.A.C. (Learning Assistance Centre), or Resource Room, teacher. She began to work with students from Kindergarten to Grade 8 who were have difficulty learning to read. For the last eight years of teaching in public schools, Jenny was the Early Literacy Coordinator for her school district. She trained teachers and teacher assistants on how to teach reading, giving workshops that sometimes lasted a week.
Since 2013 Jenny has been going to Cambodia, where learning English is important, to help teachers implement her programs. There she began helping teachers to improve their English pronunciation, consequently developing her latest program for EAL and unique students, ages eight to adult.
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!
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