About Us
About the Founder
Margaret Bertram is the CEO and Founder of Get Reading!, the reading program taking tutoring Scottsdale AZ to the next level! Her mission and the purpose of Get Reading! Is to make every child a reader!
Margaret is an experienced teacher and literacy consultant, with a particular expertise in teaching struggling readers. In Australia, Margaret taught for more than 25 years in the primary school classroom and spent years researching and trialing different methods of teaching kids to read, especially those students for whom reading did not come easily. Her research brought her to a program for struggling readers called Toe by Toe. Toe by Toe was developed in the UK by a wonderful teacher named Keda Cowling through 20 years of action research. Toe by Toe embodies the research on how to best teach a struggling reader and has a proven track record globally of turning HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS children’s lives around. For Margaret, Toe by Toe also won “Best in Class” award for several other reasons.
- It is so affordable (only $40- for a book),
- It is simple (it is all in the manual, you just need a coach with a pencil)
- Anyone who can read can teach someone to read (no need for expensive tutors or highly-trained reading teachers )
- It works (read some of the testimonials without crying!)
You can buy a book and start teaching tomorrow, or if you’re looking for tutoring Scottsdale AZ, then contact Get Reading! and we will get you a trained tutor.
Margaret progressed from the classroom to a coaching role, devoting a further 15 years to helping teachers teach reading in both Australia and the US. After discovering the incredible successes of the Toe by Toe program with even the hardest-to-teach students, she shared the program with many of her teachers and school administrators who were frustrated by the numbers of students who were not learning to read. And the successes only continued.
Margaret spent 10 years consulting in New York City schools and other locations around the US, for the biggest and best education consulting firm in New York City.
She realized that many schools were unable to complete the Toe by Toe program because of the need for the commitment of one teacher to one child for 6 months. Not many schools have the funding to pay for one teacher working with individual children every day for 6 months.
Still driven by a determination to find the best way to teach struggling readers, she continued learning and improving her knowledge and skills. Finally, Margaret saw how her mission to make ‘everyone a reader’ required the power to be placed into the hands of the people who loved the child most; the parents. Parents would not give up on their own child. Parents would be as tenacious as Margaret in doing ‘whatever it takes’ to help their child become a reader.
Her vast experience and passion for the failed reader drove her to establish her own company, Get Reading!, as newest and best tutoring Scottsdale AZ has to offer!
Get Reading! focuses on empowering parents of struggling readers to take over the responsibility for teaching their child to read. In the 5 years before the child starts school, the parents can enrich their child’s pre-reading skills and phonological awareness so they are ready to read. Once they get to school, parents can support the child in developing their phonics knowledge and skills, reading to and with the child, and monitoring their progress. And with the parents of students not progressing, Get Reading! works with parents as a tutoring Scottsdale AZ service to get the child reading before it’s too late.
About Get Reading!
Get Reading! is a company dedicated to addressing the crisis in education in America and around the world. We want to get reading to the millions of kids who despite everyone’s best efforts and intentare still unable to read. Get Reading provides:
- resources for parents of newborn babies through to school-age children to help parents develop their children’s language and reading readiness for school,
- training for tutors in how to use Toe by Toe to teach struggling readers to read,
- training for parents in how to teach their own child to read, and
- support at home for homeschoolers and families unable to manage the educational needs of a child with reading problems.
Would you like to join Margaret in her mission to save the world and make every child a reader? Buy a Toe by Toe manual and see how easy it can be.
Be a Superhero! Teach someone to READ!
At Get Reading we want to encourage parents, partners, or tutors of struggling readers to teach their child, partner, or student to read.
Good news! TOE BY TOE is all you need.
Toe by Toe is a program developed by a remarkable teacher in the UK. Her name was Keda Cowling. Keda was a dedicated and determined schoolteacher who tutored struggling readers to read in her home after school. It took her over 20 years to refine her program and methodology until she had a program that worked. That program is Toe by Toe.
Incidentally, it took another 10 years for international research into reading instruction to confirm Keda Cowling’s findings. The most effective means of teaching reading is through systematic, explicit phonics; especially for children with dyslexia, and other learning difficulties. This is precisely what Keda has given us in her manual.
The Toe by Toe manual provides you with a simple program for teaching a struggling reader. In fact, it is so simple and explicit you do not have to be a teacher to coach someone to read using Toe by Toe. Many moms, friends, partners, and good Samaritans the world over have used Toe by Toe to teach someone to read. Everything is in the manual. You just need a pencil, a manual, and 20 minutes a day.
Toe by Toe can help any struggling reader learn to read, including:
- children over 8 or 9 years old,
- teenagers, or
- adults.
By struggling reader, we mean someone who struggles to decode the words on the page. That might mean being completely unable to read a word, right through to stumbling so much that the reading is exhausting and frustrating, and comprehension is very difficult. Reading is a very complex skill, with many sub-skills having to work together at once to translate the letters on the page into something meaningful. When we analyze the complexity, it is really a miracle that so many of us learn how to read as children.
As we learn to read, we all struggle until we master all the sub-skills.
Most of us become independent readers by about the age of 8, however, many factors can get in the way of learning to read.
Some children aren’t ready at 5 or 6 years old, some have hearing or vision problems, some kids have difficulties at home and their emotional state is not good for learning. The list of reasons goes on and on. Consequently, these children usually never learn to read. The longer they struggle the harder it is for their own mindset to believe that they will ever learn to read. And research shows that success after 8 years of age becomes increasingly more challenging as time progresses. Which is why we offer our services as a tutoring Scottsdale AZ businesses.
We are all individuals, and what works for one child does not always work for another. However, given time and the right support, research indicates that 90-95% of us are capable of learning to read. Unfortunately, more than 10% of us fail to learn to read at school (If you read the statistics you would be horrified!). Schools devote enormous amounts of time, money, and effort to helping students learn to read, but too many kids slip through the cracks. That’s where Toe by Toe comes in. Toe by Toe takes the student back to the beginning and teaches the foundational skills and understandings of reading. The program progresses step by step, ‘toe by toe’ through the process again, and fills in any gaps in their learning. After approximately 6 months, when the student has completed the program, they can read independently. Now the child’s reading is accurate and fluent, comprehension is so much easier. And everything at school becomes easier. The more they read, the better they get, the more they learn, and the smarter they become.
If you want to teach your child to read, or you are seeking tutoring Scottsdale AZ or anywhere in the USA, Get Reading can help.
Teaching someone to read has such a huge impact on their life.
Be a SUPERHERO. Teach someone to READ!