PINE STATE
LEARNING

Writing Tutoring

One-on-one writing intervention, offered part time in tandem with traditional school or as a separate daily intensive. We look for the root of writing difficulties and design instruction based on areas of need.

A student looking down, writing with a pencil at a classroom table

Writing difficulty can be complex.  We examine three skill areas for each of our students, and design interventions to address those challenges specifically.

Handwriting difficulty. The motor act of forming letters is slow or effortful. Handwriting does not become automatic, so it consumes the attention the student needs for spelling and ideas.
Spelling Difficulty Spelling breaks down because of the same phonological and orthographic processing weaknesses that underlie dyslexia: mapping sounds to letters and storing the visual patterns of words. 
Executive writing needs.  Planning, organizing, and revising written language is difficult. 

Assessment first

Every writing student begins with a skills assessment measuring handwriting automaticity, spelling (encoding), sentence construction, and written expression, alongside the phonological and orthographic processing that spelling depends on.

Because spelling and reading share the same underlying processing, writing assessment often reveals the same gaps as reading assessment; instruction addresses them together. The profile determines the intervention.

Progress monitoring

Skills are measured before instruction begins, monitored in every session, and re-tested with the same instruments at the end of a round, so growth is documented rather than estimated.

See a sample skills assessment (redacted) →

Parent updates every 20 hours of instruction report where the student is in the curriculum, what they have mastered, and what comes next.

See a sample parent update (redacted) →

The programs we draw from

We separate transcription from composition and build each explicitly, so the mechanics stop consuming the ideas.

Orton-Gillingham spelling
Encoding taught as the mirror of decoding: the same phoneme-grapheme correspondences, syllable types, and spelling rules, practiced through structured dictation from sounds to words to sentences. Students learn why words are spelled the way they are, which holds better than memorized lists.
Seeing Stars® for orthographic memory
For students who cannot hold the visual form of words, Seeing Stars® builds symbol imagery for spelling: seeing a word in the mind's eye and checking it. This is what makes irregular word spelling and proofreading possible.
Handwriting and transcription fluency
Letter formation taught explicitly and practiced to automaticity, so the physical act of writing stops competing with thinking. When handwriting remains a barrier for an older student, we build keyboarding fluency and work with schools on appropriate accommodations.
Sentence to composition
Written expression built from the sentence up: expanding, combining, and revising sentences, then paragraph structures, then longer forms. Visualizing and Verbalizing® supports the planning side, giving students imagery to organize before they draft.

What a typical plan covers

●Explicit handwriting or keyboarding work until transcription is automatic
●Structured spelling through dictation: sounds, then words, then sentences
●A bank of correctly spelled high-frequency words for writing
●Sentence-level instruction: expanding, combining, and revising
●Paragraph and essay structures once sentence writing is solid
●Spelling rules and conventions applied in the student's own contextual writing

The starting point depends on the assessment: some students begin with letter formation, others with paragraph organization.

Start with a free 15-minute consultation.

We will hear your child's writing history, review any assessment data you have, and recommend a starting point.

Book a free 15-minute consult
207.426.4267 lisa.murphy@pinestatelearning.com
Our Commitment to Equity

We are committed to working against the way that racial and socioeconomic privilege manifests itself in the identification and remediation of learning disabilities.

We do what we can by offering need based scholarships, doing pro-bono consultation for families with economic needs, providing services in some of Maine's lowest resource schools, and working with educational advocates on the toughest cases to help ALL students get what they need.