Reading, Writing, Spelling
Strong reading skills are essential for success in school. Our approach gives students the tools to develop reading proficiency. Our programs develop the two essential components of reading: decoding skills and comprehension abilities.
Reading is smooth and fluid when students master decoding skills, in other words, when students have learned which sound is represented by a given letter. The key to helping students develop reading decoding skill is to use methods that fully engage the brain. Methods that completely engage the brain also totally engage the senses. Our approach to developing skillful reading decoding utilizes state of the art, multi-sensory techniques that fully activate a student’s learning attributes.
One of the programs we use to help readers develop decoding proficiency is Master the Code. Master the Code is a revolutionary sound-to-code based reading system that aids individuals of all ages who struggle with sounding out and decoding words. It is especially beneficial for student readers who have developed inefficient or inaccurate reading decoding habits. Master the Code combines systematic instruction in sound-symbol relationships with drills that develop a student’s attention and automatic recognition of sounds and letters so that a student will develop the foundational skills essential for reading. This program improves:
- Memory (ability to remember the sound-symbol relationship)
- Sound Segmenting (ability to separate or unglue sounds)
- Sound Blending (ability to put together sounds to form words)
- Auditory Analysis (ability to analyze sounds)
- Processing Speed (ability to process information quickly)
- Working Memory (ability to remember new information and to combine it with previously learned information)
- Attention (ability to stay on the given task in spite of distraction)
- Visualization (ability to create and use mental images)
- Reading Fluidity (ability to read smoothly)
- Logic and Reasoning (ability to reason nonverbally and solve problems)
Our strong comprehension programs provide help to students at all grade levels who desire to understand and learn more from what they read. Our approach helps students develop the skills to focus on the thinking processes needed to understand text. We teach skills and strategies that good readers use to comprehend what they read. We train comprehension strategies that promote understanding before, during and after reading to promote significant increases in comprehension skill. Some of the important components of comprehension which our programs develop include:
- Using pre-reading techniques to warm up for reading
- Connecting prior knowledge to the current material
- Acquiring new vocabulary words
- Identifying the structure of reading material (for example, cause and effect, description, compare and contrast, etc.)
- Adjusting the reading rate for the difficulty of material and purpose of reading
- Knowing whether the material is comprehended and how to adjust strategies when material is not being adequately understood
- Creating visual images of what is being read
- Focusing attention by asking questions while reading – in other words, being an “active” reader
- Using techniques such as graphic organizers, outlines and color-coding to increase understanding and anchor information in memory
To download an article that discusses the advantages of working with an educational therapist over a tutor to develop your child’s reading proficiency, click on the link below.
Click here to download an article on Helping Your Child Develop Reading Mastery