FAQs

Structured literacy is a way of teaching reading and writing that is based on the science of reading, which is a body of research that has identified the essential skills and knowledge that children need to learn to read and write. Structured literacy methods include all the components of literacy, from speech to text: speech sounds (phonemic awareness), phonics, spelling (orthography), meaningful word parts (morphology), vocabulary, sentence structure (syntax), and discourse comprehension. Instructional features include explicit and systematic instruction with attention to prerequisite skills, prompt and targeted error correction, carefully structured examples, initial use of synthetic phonics for associating speech sounds with their letter symbols, increasing complexity with cumulative review, and data-based decision-making.

Structured literacy is an umbrella term that covers literacy-intervention approaches like Orton-Gillingham (O-G) and others which are based on the science of reading. Structured literacy therapy is the gold standard for treating dyslexia and other literacy challenges. At Lexercise, we’ve built an online platform based on research-backed principles and the latest research in the science of reading that helps your family get this critical help from your home and on your schedule. Through our online dyslexia programs, we provide customized lessons, interactive games, and engaging activities to help your child master reading and spelling.

Lexercise offers a unique approach to literacy therapy by combining weekly online lessons with daily interactive practice games, which provide personalized instruction and significantly more practice than traditional methods. This online platform allows for continuous updates to the curriculum, ensuring students benefit from the latest advancements in reading science.

The Lexercise Structured Literacy Curriculum^TM provides easy-to-follow lessons, interactive games, and engaging activities to help students master reading and spelling. The curriculum uses a speech to print approach with stations and procedures that have been carefully designed to offer instruction at the pace the student needs to fully address the domains of literacy development. Students achieve gains in reading, writing, spelling, reading comprehension, and sentence formation. This gives the student tools to develop their literacy skills so that they grow in confidence.

Old Way

In traditional Orton-Gillingham therapy and in most other programs, the tutor or therapist sees the student multiple times per week. During a session they teach the student new material (direct instruction) and also do practice activities with the student. The practice done in the sessions is generally all the practice the student gets.

Lexercise Way

In contrast, Lexercise splits the direct instruction and practice. You and your student will have a lesson once per week, and then the other days of the week, your child will reinforce what they learned in the lesson by doing their online, independent games practice. Also, you can do some parent-led activities with your child to further support them. Lexercise clients get significantly more practice than if they were doing a twice-a-week traditional O-G session. They will receive over 400 of what we call "response challenges" per week! For this reason, the Lexercise platform is providing your child with much more practice than would be humanly possible in the traditional therapy model.

The curriculum's customizable lesson objectives, along with the daily deliberate practice that ties back to the lessons and tracks your child's mastery, are designed to equip your student to move from struggling reader to word expert!

Further, the Lexercise platform is fully online, so we are able to adapt and improve our curriculum and lessons at any time to stay up-to-date with developments in the science of reading. Since we don't have to update printed materials to include the latest consensus research, our students benefit from lesson materials that don't go out of date.

Lexercise Professional Therapy gives you the best in structured literacy (Orton-Gilllingham) intervention: an expert therapist, a research-backed curriculum, and personalized daily practice. It is sold in 4-session sets, with each session including these two components:

• A One-on-One Live Instruction Lesson: Each week your dedicated therapist works with you and your child in one 45-minute, one-on-one, interactive online therapy lesson to illustrate, explain, and make memorable the appropriate set of concepts at your child’s level.
• Daily Practice: The other days of the week your child completes practice to review and master what was taught in the one-on-one lesson. Your therapist adjusts practice for your child’s needs and your schedule. Practice is of two types:
  1. Online practice games your child completes independently through their Lexercise dashboard, and
  2. Review and other tabletop activities for you to do with your child as your schedule allows.

Basic Therapy provides you and your child with access to structured literacy (Orton-Gillingham) intervention at an affordable price. Each lesson generally lasts a week and has two components:

• Weekly, Pre-recorded Lessons: Each week you will watch an 8-minute parent training video and then deliver a 30-minute, interactive online therapy lesson to your child. The video and lesson materials are delivered by our founder and leading literacy expert, Sandie Barrie Blackley, and can be navigated at a pace you set. The lesson prompts your child for a response every 20 seconds so that they practice and quickly learn the new material.
• Daily practice: The other days of the week your child completes practice to review and master what was taught in the lesson. Practice is of two types:
  1. Online practice games your child completes independently (~15 minutes) at least 4 days for each lesson, and
  2. Parent-assisted review and practice activities for you to do with your child each day as your schedule allows (~15 minutes).

Lessons are designed to be completed in one week.

For example, Monday you and your child might work through the 30-minute lesson, and then the rest of the week your child would complete their online games each day, and you would support your child with parent-assisted activities as you have time. This way your child can master the material and move on to the next lesson. The following week you move your child to the next lesson and repeat the process with the new information.

Basic Therapy and Professional Therapy both use the same Lexercise Structured Literacy Curriculum^TM (Orton-Gillingham) that is proven to help with reading, writing, and spelling problems. They both include weekly lessons, shared tabletop activities, and online practice games. In Professional Therapy there is greater customization of the lessons, games, and activities by your dedicated therapist.

The main difference between Professional Therapy and Basic Therapy is price, customization, and time.

Professional Therapy costs more than Basic Therapy because you are getting the focused support and expertise of a professional literacy therapist. Your therapist not only meets with you for a live one-on-one customized lesson each week, but they also personalize and monitor your daily practice and serve as your ongoing expert resource. Unlike many tutors, our therapists are qualified clinical professionals, and you are paying for their expertise, time, and personalized support of you and your child. Having the support of a therapist allows your child to make very fast progress with most children being remediated in a matter of months. If this option fits in your budget, this is the recommended route.

Basic Therapy gives you access to the same structured literacy curriculum and online games, but with Basic Therapy, the parent delivers the lesson to the child using lessons recorded by our co-founder, Sandie Barrie-Blackley. Basic Therapy is self paced and asynchronous and grants access to our research-backed curriculum in a more affordable way. You still have access to your dedicated therapist through online chat to answer your questions and get some customization of your child's therapy, but your therapist does not deliver the lesson to your child each week.

We stand by our service because Lexercise gets results! Our data show that about 97% of children and parents, who fully engage in Professional Therapy by participating in the weekly sessions and completing their daily practice, make at least a grade level of reading improvement in 8 weeks. If you and your student fully engage in therapy, but your child doesn't make that level of improvement, Lexercise will pay for your third month of therapy.

Your therapist will establish your child’s baseline reading level during the first session. This is done by using the San Diego Quick Assessment along with grade-leveled tasks and reading passages. In your child's 8th session, your therapist will re-assess your child’s reading level on the same assessment protocol.

If the child hasn't made the gains in spite of you and the child doing your part in those first eight sessions, your third month of therapy is free! Lexercise pays for it, not your therapist. This keeps incentives aligned for therapists to do an accurate job of assessing your child’s progress.

Of course, for your child to make this level of progress, you have to show up to sessions and ensure your child does their regular practice. For more specifics head over to our Guarantee page.

Yes you can. Since both services use the same curriculum, switching between the two is easy, and the system will track your progress, allowing you to pick up where you left off.

The Lexercise Structured Literacy Curriculum^TM has 44 to 52 lessons, each of which is designed to take one week to complete. Where your student is placed in the curriculum depends on their specific needs. Some students may need to take longer on a particular lesson, and some parents of younger students may decide not to have their child complete the higher levels of the curriculum. Therefore, the time it takes to complete the program will depend on the student, their pace of learning, their curriculum placement, and the goals for the student.

Lexercise will match your child with a therapist who best matches your child in terms of their needs and your availability for the weekly session. There are Lexercise therapists in all North American time zones (as well as some outside North America), so scheduling your weekly session at a time that works for you and your child is usually easy.

Practice consists of two parts:

• Your child’s independent practice usually lasts about 15 minutes a day and might consist of games, brief instructional slides, and reading & letter formation activities. We recommend a minimum of 4 days of practice after each session, but your child can practice every day!
• Parent-led practice is assigned by the therapist when in Professional Therapy and by our system when in Basic Therapy. It is accessed through your parent portal and consists of shared activities that allow you to work with your child as your schedule permits. These activities consist of printables, table top activities, and on-screen practice exercises that reinforce the concepts of your child's current lesson.

Doing practice this way, we can let the computer do what it’s good at (rapid responses), while you provide additional support with more tabletop and conversational activities (relationship and social interactivity).

An interesting fact is that in an average online session a Lexercise therapist will get about 80 responses from your child. This is excellent. But compare this to the fact that in 10-15 minutes of playing our online practice games, your child will be prompted to give 60 or more responses! This is very meaningful practice.

Every day when you and your child complete the assigned practice, all of that practice data is recorded and shared with your therapist so they can monitor and assess your child’s progress. That data is also visible to you on your parent portal.

The Lexercise practice platform is tied to our Lexercise Structured Literacy Curriculum^TM and the lessons it consists of. Each challenge a student encounters in their daily practice is specifically designed to give them the practice and review they need to master the concepts taught in the lesson. The Lexercise online practice is only available as part of an online therapy subscription.

If you are curious about our online practice games, you can try them at this link.

Structured literacy is a way of teaching reading and writing that is based on the science of reading, which is a body of research that has identified the essential skills and knowledge that children need to learn to read and write. Structured literacy methods include all the components of literacy, from speech to text: speech sounds (phonemic awareness), phonics, spelling (orthography), meaningful word parts (morphology), vocabulary, sentence structure (syntax), and discourse comprehension. Instructional features include explicit and systematic instruction with attention to prerequisite skills, prompt and targeted error correction, carefully structured examples, initial use of synthetic phonics for associating speech sounds with their letter symbols, increasing complexity with cumulative review, and data-based decision-making.

Structured literacy is an umbrella term that covers literacy-intervention approaches like Orton-Gillingham (O-G) and others which are based on the science of reading. Structured literacy therapy is the gold standard for treating dyslexia and other literacy challenges. At Lexercise, we’ve built an online platform based on research-backed principles and the latest research in the science of reading that helps your family get this critical help from your home and on your schedule. Through our online dyslexia programs, we provide customized lessons, interactive games, and engaging activities to help your child master reading and spelling.

Lexercise offers a unique approach to literacy therapy by combining weekly online lessons with daily interactive practice games, which provide personalized instruction and significantly more practice than traditional methods. This online platform allows for continuous updates to the curriculum, ensuring students benefit from the latest advancements in reading science.

The Lexercise Structured Literacy Curriculum^TM provides easy-to-follow lessons, interactive games, and engaging activities to help students master reading and spelling. The curriculum uses a speech to print approach with stations and procedures that have been carefully designed to offer instruction at the pace the student needs to fully address the domains of literacy development. Students achieve gains in reading, writing, spelling, reading comprehension, and sentence formation. This gives the student tools to develop their literacy skills so that they grow in confidence.

Old Way

In traditional Orton-Gillingham therapy and in most other programs, the tutor or therapist sees the student multiple times per week. During a session they teach the student new material (direct instruction) and also do practice activities with the student. The practice done in the sessions is generally all the practice the student gets.

Lexercise Way

In contrast, Lexercise splits the direct instruction and practice. You and your student will have a lesson once per week, and then the other days of the week, your child will reinforce what they learned in the lesson by doing their online, independent games practice. Also, you can do some parent-led activities with your child to further support them. Lexercise clients get significantly more practice than if they were doing a twice-a-week traditional O-G session. They will receive over 400 of what we call "response challenges" per week! For this reason, the Lexercise platform is providing your child with much more practice than would be humanly possible in the traditional therapy model.

The curriculum's customizable lesson objectives, along with the daily deliberate practice that ties back to the lessons and tracks your child's mastery, are designed to equip your student to move from struggling reader to word expert!

Further, the Lexercise platform is fully online, so we are able to adapt and improve our curriculum and lessons at any time to stay up-to-date with developments in the science of reading. Since we don't have to update printed materials to include the latest consensus research, our students benefit from lesson materials that don't go out of date.

Lexercise Professional Therapy gives you the best in structured literacy (Orton-Gilllingham) intervention: an expert therapist, a research-backed curriculum, and personalized daily practice. It is sold in 4-session sets, with each session including these two components:

• A One-on-One Live Instruction Lesson: Each week your dedicated therapist works with you and your child in one 45-minute, one-on-one, interactive online therapy lesson to illustrate, explain, and make memorable the appropriate set of concepts at your child’s level.
• Daily Practice: The other days of the week your child completes practice to review and master what was taught in the one-on-one lesson. Your therapist adjusts practice for your child’s needs and your schedule. Practice is of two types:
  1. Online practice games your child completes independently through their Lexercise dashboard, and
  2. Review and other tabletop activities for you to do with your child as your schedule allows.

Basic Therapy provides you and your child with access to structured literacy (Orton-Gillingham) intervention at an affordable price. Each lesson generally lasts a week and has two components:

• Weekly, Pre-recorded Lessons: Each week you will watch an 8-minute parent training video and then deliver a 30-minute, interactive online therapy lesson to your child. The video and lesson materials are delivered by our founder and leading literacy expert, Sandie Barrie Blackley, and can be navigated at a pace you set. The lesson prompts your child for a response every 20 seconds so that they practice and quickly learn the new material.
• Daily practice: The other days of the week your child completes practice to review and master what was taught in the lesson. Practice is of two types:
  1. Online practice games your child completes independently (~15 minutes) at least 4 days for each lesson, and
  2. Parent-assisted review and practice activities for you to do with your child each day as your schedule allows (~15 minutes).

Lessons are designed to be completed in one week.

For example, Monday you and your child might work through the 30-minute lesson, and then the rest of the week your child would complete their online games each day, and you would support your child with parent-assisted activities as you have time. This way your child can master the material and move on to the next lesson. The following week you move your child to the next lesson and repeat the process with the new information.

Basic Therapy and Professional Therapy both use the same Lexercise Structured Literacy Curriculum^TM (Orton-Gillingham) that is proven to help with reading, writing, and spelling problems. They both include weekly lessons, shared tabletop activities, and online practice games. In Professional Therapy there is greater customization of the lessons, games, and activities by your dedicated therapist.

The main difference between Professional Therapy and Basic Therapy is price, customization, and time.

Professional Therapy costs more than Basic Therapy because you are getting the focused support and expertise of a professional literacy therapist. Your therapist not only meets with you for a live one-on-one customized lesson each week, but they also personalize and monitor your daily practice and serve as your ongoing expert resource. Unlike many tutors, our therapists are qualified clinical professionals, and you are paying for their expertise, time, and personalized support of you and your child. Having the support of a therapist allows your child to make very fast progress with most children being remediated in a matter of months. If this option fits in your budget, this is the recommended route.

Basic Therapy gives you access to the same structured literacy curriculum and online games, but with Basic Therapy, the parent delivers the lesson to the child using lessons recorded by our co-founder, Sandie Barrie-Blackley. Basic Therapy is self paced and asynchronous and grants access to our research-backed curriculum in a more affordable way. You still have access to your dedicated therapist through online chat to answer your questions and get some customization of your child's therapy, but your therapist does not deliver the lesson to your child each week.

We stand by our service because Lexercise gets results! Our data show that about 97% of children and parents, who fully engage in Professional Therapy by participating in the weekly sessions and completing their daily practice, make at least a grade level of reading improvement in 8 weeks. If you and your student fully engage in therapy, but your child doesn't make that level of improvement, Lexercise will pay for your third month of therapy.

Your therapist will establish your child’s baseline reading level during the first session. This is done by using the San Diego Quick Assessment along with grade-leveled tasks and reading passages. In your child's 8th session, your therapist will re-assess your child’s reading level on the same assessment protocol.

If the child hasn't made the gains in spite of you and the child doing your part in those first eight sessions, your third month of therapy is free! Lexercise pays for it, not your therapist. This keeps incentives aligned for therapists to do an accurate job of assessing your child’s progress.

Of course, for your child to make this level of progress, you have to show up to sessions and ensure your child does their regular practice. For more specifics head over to our Guarantee page.

Yes you can. Since both services use the same curriculum, switching between the two is easy, and the system will track your progress, allowing you to pick up where you left off.

The Lexercise Structured Literacy Curriculum^TM has 44 to 52 lessons, each of which is designed to take one week to complete. Where your student is placed in the curriculum depends on their specific needs. Some students may need to take longer on a particular lesson, and some parents of younger students may decide not to have their child complete the higher levels of the curriculum. Therefore, the time it takes to complete the program will depend on the student, their pace of learning, their curriculum placement, and the goals for the student.

Lexercise will match your child with a therapist who best matches your child in terms of their needs and your availability for the weekly session. There are Lexercise therapists in all North American time zones (as well as some outside North America), so scheduling your weekly session at a time that works for you and your child is usually easy.

Practice consists of two parts:

• Your child’s independent practice usually lasts about 15 minutes a day and might consist of games, brief instructional slides, and reading & letter formation activities. We recommend a minimum of 4 days of practice after each session, but your child can practice every day!
• Parent-led practice is assigned by the therapist when in Professional Therapy and by our system when in Basic Therapy. It is accessed through your parent portal and consists of shared activities that allow you to work with your child as your schedule permits. These activities consist of printables, table top activities, and on-screen practice exercises that reinforce the concepts of your child's current lesson.

Doing practice this way, we can let the computer do what it’s good at (rapid responses), while you provide additional support with more tabletop and conversational activities (relationship and social interactivity).

An interesting fact is that in an average online session a Lexercise therapist will get about 80 responses from your child. This is excellent. But compare this to the fact that in 10-15 minutes of playing our online practice games, your child will be prompted to give 60 or more responses! This is very meaningful practice.

Every day when you and your child complete the assigned practice, all of that practice data is recorded and shared with your therapist so they can monitor and assess your child’s progress. That data is also visible to you on your parent portal.

The Lexercise practice platform is tied to our Lexercise Structured Literacy Curriculum^TM and the lessons it consists of. Each challenge a student encounters in their daily practice is specifically designed to give them the practice and review they need to master the concepts taught in the lesson. The Lexercise online practice is only available as part of an online therapy subscription.

If you are curious about our online practice games, you can try them at this link.

Our dyslexia therapists are world-class experts in the science of reading. All of the therapists working with students on the Lexercise platform have been qualified and have had a supervised practicum in structured literacy. Although they may have been trained through different programs and may hold different certifications, they are all highly qualified and trained. Our therapists are passionate about literacy and possess the skills to use evidence-based tools to customize intervention to equip children with the skills they need to become word experts. You can learn more about our therapists and their qualifications here and schedule a free 15-minute consultation to discuss your child's literacy development at this link.

Lexercise therapists are experts in structured literacy (Orton-Gillingham). All therapists working with students on the Lexercise platform have gone through a rigorous qualification and training process and are knowledgeable about the structure of the English language and multisensory, structured literacy intervention. Although you'll see that our therapists have a variety of professional certifications, they have all completed a supervised practicum in structured literacy that allows them to apply their expertise to customizing your student's intervention.

Utilizing the Lexercise structured literacy program, our therapists have been serving families around the English-speaking world since 2008. If you are looking for an Orton-Gillingham solution for your child, schedule a free consultation with one of our expert therapists to learn more about our program and how we can help your struggling reader.

Typically, a student will work with the same therapist for the duration of their therapy. (This is true for Professional and Basic Therapy services.) In the event that a change in scheduling results in the need for a change in therapist, our team of specialists is available to support families as needed to allow your student to continue their forward progress.

Getting Started

In your very first Professional Therapy lesson, your therapist will perform a language-processing assessment on your child. This set of assessments is designed to identify your child’s strengths and weaknesses so that therapy can be personalized to their needs. It allows your therapist to place your child at the appropriate place in the curriculum. So for example, if your child needs to start at Level 5, she will skip Levels 1-4.

Similarly in Basic Therapy, during your first week you will give your child a spelling test that will allow your therapist to place your child in the structured literacy curriculum.

Personalization Throughout Your Therapy

Your therapist is regularly monitoring and customizing your child’s lessons and practice. So for example, if your child is strong in vocabulary but weak in phonological awareness, your therapist might decrease the time and activities each week for vocabulary practice and increase that of letter-sound practice. Your therapist can see your child’s practice accuracy and fluency data and can customize the lesson and practice to truly meet your child’s personal needs.

Yes, Lexercise Therapy is a subscription service intended to give families access to four weekly sessions using our structured literacy curriculum and daily intensive practice. The subscription service is prepaid four weeks at a time and automatically bills for the next set of four sessions. You can cancel your subscription at any time through the Lexercise Parent Portal.

Yes to both!

Lexercise has therapy groups who are approved providers for numerous state ESA and scholarship programs already! Please visit this page Student Financial Aid for Reading Programs where you can learn more and can request to speak to one of our therapists to learn whether your state funding can be used for Lexercise therapy for your child.

In regard to medical savings accounts, you can use your HSA, MSA, or FLEX card to pay for services.

For any tax-related questions, we recommend you refer to this document IRS Publication 502, Medical and Dental Expenses (PDF).

It is our experience that educational evaluations and interventions are not covered by medical insurance plans because there are no ICD codes for these services. (ICD codes are medical codes required by insurance companies to reimburse medical expenses.) However, families do use funds from their Health Savings Account (HSA), Medical Savings Account (MSA), or a FLEX Account to pay for Lexercise services.

Potentially, yes. The IRS definition of a qualified medical expense is quite broad and includes therapy for “learning disabilities” (i.e., dyslexia). This means that the cost of Lexercise therapy, which provides specialized dyslexia tutoring, might be eligible for a tax deduction. See page 13 of this IRS publication (PDF) for more details. We suggest that customers consult their accountant or tax preparer to determine if they qualify for this deduction. If it appears you will qualify, note that a physician’s recommendation is required.

Most people do not need a doctor's recommendation to use Lexercise. However, if you do need it for tax purposes for example, read on.

In recent years, pediatricians have become more aware of how common dyslexia is among children (1 in 5 children have dyslexia) and of the poor health outcomes and difficulties that may be experienced by patients with dyslexia or other disorders related to their literacy development. Left too long or undiagnosed, these challenges can impact students' mental health, leading to anxiety or depression.

Since this is a major factor in your child's overall wellness, you can approach your pediatrician armed with your student's risk assessment from our free dyslexia screener and a printout with the link to this article Speaking to Your Pediatrician About Dyslexia to enlist their help and to request a prescription or letter recommending Lexercise therapy for your child. That article contains links to scholarly articles published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, such as Learning Disabilities, Dyslexia, and Vision and Reintroducing Dyslexia: Early Identification and Implications for Pediatric Practice.