Doral Tutor Experts Structured Literacy · Doral, FL
Free consultation
Leslie Cedeño · Founder & Lead Tutor

Over 18 years helping children read, write, and believe they can.

Structured Literacy instruction for elementary and middle school students — in English and Spanish, in Doral and across Miami-Dade.

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Leslie Cedeño

18+

Years in education

100+

Hours of Structured Literacy training

IMSE · AIM
Lexercise · Yale

Four independent providers

Bilingual

English & Spanish

Training completed 2023–2025 with the Institute for Multi-Sensory Education, the AIM Institute for Learning & Research, Lexercise, and Yale University via Coursera.

About Leslie

A teacher first, a school leader, and for a decade a private tutor.

For more than eighteen years, Leslie Cedeño has helped children find their footing in the classroom — first as a teacher and school leader in Caracas, Venezuela, and for the past decade as a private tutor working with families across Miami-Dade and Broward.

She began in early childhood education, teaching Spanish to three- and four-year-olds and later teaching English to preschool and primary students. As English Teacher and Principal at La Casita de Mis Teachers, she designed and ran an after-school program built specifically for students who needed more support with English than a regular school day could give them.

Since 2015 she has worked one-on-one with elementary and middle school students in South Florida, concentrating on the places where children most often get stuck: phonics and phonemic awareness for early readers, reading comprehension for students who can decode a page but don't absorb it, English grammar, and math strategies that build real mental-calculation confidence. She also prepares students for Florida's FAST assessments.

Between 2023 and 2025 she completed more than one hundred hours of Structured Literacy training — with the Institute for Multi-Sensory Education, the AIM Institute for Learning & Research, Lexercise, and Yale University's Overcoming Dyslexia course with Dr. Sally Shaywitz — formalizing an approach she had already been using intuitively for years.

For Doral families whose children learn in one language at school and speak another at home, teaching in both isn't a convenience — it's often the difference between a child understanding a lesson and quietly falling behind.

My approach

What Structured Literacy means for your child

Most reading difficulty isn't a matter of effort. It's a matter of instruction that never made the structure of English visible. Structured Literacy makes it visible: every lesson is explicit, systematic and cumulative, and multisensory.

Your child sees the letter, says the sound, writes the shape, and feels the movement, so the learning has more than one path into memory. This is the same method used to teach students with dyslexia — and it happens to be the clearest, most efficient way to teach any child to read.

For younger readers · K–2

Sounds before sentences

Sounds, letters, blending, spelling patterns — and the confidence to attack an unfamiliar word instead of freezing on it.

For older students · 3–8

The building blocks of academic words

A student who knows what port, trans, and -able mean can decode transportable without ever having seen it. This is how vocabulary scales — a particular advantage for Spanish-speaking students, whose first language shares those same Latin roots.

Who I work with

You may recognize your child here.

  • The child who is falling behind in reading and losing confidence a little more each grading period
  • The student who can read aloud fluently but can't tell you what the page said
  • Bilingual learners navigating English at school and Spanish at home
  • Students with dyslexia or suspected reading difficulty
  • Children preparing for FAST assessments who need targeted reinforcement, not more worksheets
  • Families who want to get ahead of a problem rather than wait for a report card to confirm it
How it works

Four steps, no guesswork.

  1. 01

    Free consultation

    We talk about what you're seeing at home, what the teacher reports, and what your child says about school. No cost, no obligation.

  2. 02

    Assessment

    I evaluate where your child actually is — not what grade level says they should be: phonological awareness, decoding, fluency, comprehension, spelling.

  3. 03

    A plan built for your child

    A specific starting point, specific skills in a specific order, and a realistic timeline.

  4. 04

    Sessions & progress you can see

    Regular updates on what we've covered, what's improving, and what's next. You'll never wonder whether it's working.

Training & credentials

Over one hundred hours, four independent providers.

Institute for Multi-Sensory Education (IMSE)

  • Morphology Plus30 hrs · Jul 2025
  • Morphology+ Refresher6.5 hrs
  • Encoding and Decoding Plus6 hrs · May 2025
  • Writing and Grammar6 hrs · May 2025

AIM Institute for Learning & Research

  • Specialized Reading Knowledge Bundle: English Learners10 credit hrs · Apr 2025

Lexercise

  • Course 1: The Structure of Written English30 hrs · May 2024

Yale University (via Coursera)

  • Overcoming Dyslexia, with Dr. Sally Shaywitz13 hrs · Dec 2023

Online non-credit course. Does not confer Yale University credit or student status.

Plus ongoing professional development with the AIM Institute and Really Great Reading.

Start with a conversation.

Reading gaps rarely close on their own. A first conversation costs nothing and tells you where your child actually stands.

Schedule a Free Consultation

Doral Tutor Experts · Doral, Florida
doraltutorexperts@gmail.com