About Us
Welcome! I’m Andreah Evans and I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Communication Science and Disorders- Speech Language Pathology. From there, I became a resource special education teacher with a focus on working with children who had been identified as having a specific learning disability in reading.
Many of the children I worked with had been diagnosed as having dyslexia which led me to search for more ways to support them. I found that my students needed a different level of intervention and that is when my journey started on becoming a certified dyslexia therapist, also known as a Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT).
What Is A CALT?
CALTs provide diagnostic, explicit, systematic, multi-sensory structured language intervention which builds a high degree of accuracy, knowledge, and independence for students with dyslexia.
CALTs must:
- Complete 2 years of extensive training
- Provide at least 700 clinical teaching hours
- Fulfill a minimum of 200 instructional hours
- Submit video demonstrations, book reports, and chapter reviews
- Pass a comprehensive exam that results in certification by the Academic Language Therapy Association
The intervention I have been trained on is called Take Flight and I have been blown away at the progress students make from our dyslexia therapy sessions. Take Flight is a multisensory, structured approach to teaching written by the education staff of the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia and Learning Disorders at Scottish Rite for Children Hospital. The intervention focuses on the five key components of basic reading instruction that have been scientifically identified by the National Reading Panel- phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.
It has been such a wonderful and gratifying experience to be on this journey with my students. More information on CALTs can be found here.