The Centre For Literacy

There’s an old electric shaver advertisement from the 1970s that Kathryn Burke laughs at when talking about her business, The Centre for Literacy. “I liked it so much, I bought the company,” the ad reads. This turned out to be the case for Kathryn and the centre, but it took awhile to get there.

Burke first became involved with the centre when she tried to tackle her eldest son’s complex learning disabilities. “He was going into Grade 1, and he could not read anything,” she says. “We were struggling with identifying specific issues, but I knew reading was a core skill that was going to have an impact across his learning.”

Founded in 1990 by reading specialist Sylvia Hannah, and then purchased by fellow reading specialist Yvonne Stern, Centre for Literacy offered the Lindamood-Bell reading intervention system to students who struggled with literacy. The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing – or LiPS program – addresses a primary cause of reading and spelling problems: Difficulty in judging the sounds within words.

“Colin started on the LiPS program, and I’ll admit I was somewhat skeptical,” says Kathryn. “But he came into our room one night. He had a book. Nothing complicated, but he read it to us from front to back. Our son learned to read at the Centre for Literacy.”