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Who are we?

We are a multidisciplinary educational institution in San Diego, California serving the North County cities of Encinitas, Carlsbad, San Marcos, Escondido and Vista with a new location in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We offer tutoring/coaching for most subjects and all grades and specialize in serving children with learning disabilities. In partnership with the Carlsbad Education Foundation and the San Marcos High School Parent Teacher Organization, we offer SAT Preparation Courses. Individual coaching is also available for both the SAT and the ACT.

How do we differ from other tutoring facilities?

• We look at the root causes of learning difficulties in order to understand the best ways to facilitate learning.
• For children to be able to learn how to read and write without problems a certain maturity of their brain and their sensory and motor abilities is necessary. Both vision, hearing, fine and gross motor abilities must have matured sufficiently. No sensible pedagogue tries to teach a newborn baby how to read and write.
• In children who have problems to learn how to read and write there are defects of vision, hearing and/or motor abilities. But there is also insufficient maturity of the brain.

Vision

Almost half the children with reading disabilities have visual problems. These may be problems of focusing the eyes on one point (convergence) or following the text (tracking). Some children have not developed eye dominance and involuntary change of dominant eye while reading causes the text to jump. These children are usually farsighted. They often get tired and loose concentration after having read for a while and their eyes may smart and itch. Since the reading process is not automatic it demands their full attention, preventing them from understanding what they have read. Dr. Chris Thomas is our resident Behavioral Optometrist.

Chris Thomas, OD Dr. Chris Thomas is a graduate of Southern College of Optometry. He is a member of The American Optometric Association (AOA), Colorado Optometric Association (COA) and College of Optometrists in Vision Development (COVD)

PTA STATEMENT 2006 With Regards to Vision

Elements of Comprehensive Health Programs, 2006

"National PTA recognizes:
Early diagnosis and treatment of children's vision problems is a necessary component to school readiness and academic learning; and that vision screening is not a substitute for a complete eye and vision evaluation by an eye doctor. Comprehensive eye and vision examinations by an optometrist or ophthalmologist are important for all children first entering school and regularly throughout their school-aged years to ensure healthy eyes and adequate vision skills essential for successful academic achievement;"

Watch a Video: Click> 20/20 is not enough!

Primitive Reflexes

Primitive reflexes are automatic stereotyped movement patterns that are outside voluntary control and direct the movements of the foetus and of the infant during the first months of life. Before an infant learns to walk it spends a lot of its time making rhythmical baby movements according to inborn directions. These movements help the infant to integrate its primitive reflexes and the baby must learn to master a considerable amount of movement patterns before it is ready to crawl or walk. At the age of three the primitive reflexes should be fully integrated and no longer interfere with movements. In some children , a greater or smaller amount of primitive reflexes remain active, which can be caused by the children having omitted some of these rhythmic baby movements or not having done them sufficiently. Non integrated primitive reflexes can cause problems with fine and gross motor skill, with vision, hearing and/or articulation and language.
Several primitive reflexes are important for reading and writing, among others the asymmetric tonic neck reflex (ATNR), the symmetric tonic neck reflex (STNR), the grasp reflex and the palmomental reflex.

Our Plan of Action

Based on our assessment tools, feedback from the student, parent(s), teachers, and other professionals, we create an individualized education plan for each student. Furthermore, all teachers are trained at It's Academic and work only on a one to one basis with students.
Given that our specialty area is school performance issues, public and private schools avail themselves of our consultation services.
Another critical component of It's Academic is the Director. He has his Ph.D. in special education and is on the faculty at San Diego State University in the Department of Special Education. He directly supervises all programs served by dedicated and credentialed teachers.

Here are the elements that make us unique and set us apart from other tutoring facilities.

1. Instructing on a one student to one teacher basis!
2. The diagnostic and analytical tools, (i.e. the Visagraph); When working with students who are behind in language arts and mathematics, we investigate visual and auditory perception as well as primitive reflex development before designing an academic program.
3. Many years of professional private and public educational experiences at all grade levels.
4. All teachers at It's Academic have diverse teaching experience and receive specialized training at the Center.
5. The finest research based programs in education to date: My Virtual Reading Coach, Reading Plus, and SAT Tutoring and preparation courses.

Please visit all of our web pages and especially the reference page. They will provide you with useful information whether you are a student, a parent, a teacher, or an administrator. Check back frequently as information is added daily.

We wish to see the trees, the tree.
The child, not the human race. -----Y. Amichai

Sincerely,

The It's Academic Staff

1615 South Rancho Santa Fe Road (map)
Suite A and B
San Marcos, California 92078
Telephone: 760-761-3692
Fax: 760- 481-7440
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.