Phonics Tutor Philippines, for a child who reads Filipino and freezes in English

Nearly always this comes down to the two spelling systems your child is holding at once. Filipino maps almost every sound to one letter, so once a child holds the letter sounds, real words come quickly. English keeps words like 'said', 'one', and 'through' that break its own rules, so a child applies the same approach that worked in Filipino, watches it fail, and quietly decides they've become a worse reader. The system changed under them, and English genuinely needs its own explicit sound-letter teaching, on top of a short list of irregular words that get learned by sight.

Sound work can start around four and needs no letters at all: rhyming, clapping syllables, hearing the first sound in a word. Letters and blending suit around five. There is no advantage in pushing earlier; a child who starts at five and enjoys it passes a child who started at three and dreaded it. What does help is that the sound work happens before print, at whatever age that lands.

It comes down to where your child already stands. Here, we start from zero, with no assumption that letters and sounds are already known. Reading Intervention starts from the opposite assumption: a child who sat through instruction already and whose decoding still lands under where the grade expects, sometimes with no real reading happening by Grade 3. That page opens with a proper assessment before any lesson plan gets built. If you're not sure which fits, mention how old your child is and what they do when a strange word shows up, and we'll point to the one that matches.

For English, a child needs both, and the argument between the two camps has cost a lot of children time. Decoding is the engine: it is what lets a child read a word nobody has taught them. But a few hundred common English words genuinely do not obey the rules and have to be recognized. Teaching only one of the two leaves a predictable gap, and which gap depends on which side you picked.

Whichever the child is meeting at school, and often both at once, which is normal here. Filipino frequently gives faster early wins because the spelling is regular, and that success is genuinely useful: a child who has read real words is easier to teach than one who has not. What matters is that the change of rules is explained out loud the day English arrives.

It varies from child to child, so the tutor maps the steps and shows you where your child sits on them after the first session. Sound work often moves quickly; the fluency stage at the end is the slow one, and it is the one that cannot be rushed because it is built on repetition.

Fifteen minutes a day matters more than the sessions do, and the instruction most parents find hardest is to correct less. Wait about three seconds at a stuck word, supply it, and let them keep going. Note the word and mention it later. Reading aloud should end with a child who wants to do it again tomorrow: that is the actual target for the home half.

Charming, and less useful than it looks. The song teaches letter names ('bee', 'see', 'dee'), and reading runs on letter sounds. A child sounding out 'bat' as 'bee-ay-tee' gets nowhere and cannot see why. It is not a setback, it is just a different thing, and the sounds still have to be taught.

In person, with a tutor near your home, is the stronger choice at five. A five-year-old holds focus far better with someone physically next to them than with a screen between you, and something like a set of letter cards moves from hand to hand in a way a shared screen can't match. Sitting in the room also means the tutor notices the instant a child checks out, before the moment is lost entirely. Online lessons still get results, just with more demand on a small child's attention, which is why we trim them down.

A 'from' number for the four-to-eight age band already sits on this page, and it firms up once we know exactly how old your child is, whether a tutor steps into your living room or logs on from elsewhere, and your city. Nothing under 90 minutes gets scheduled for a home visit. Buying a 12-hour or 24-hour stretch of lessons up front knocks the hourly price down from what a single booked hour would cost. Any number you're given gets confirmed in writing, and that written figure is what shows up on the bill.