Early Reading Programs

Building Early Childhood Reading Skills

Many children get off to a slow start in reading. Early childhood reading requires mastery of phonological awareness, required for decoding, as well as an understanding of language structure and vocabulary.
Learning to read

Our Approach
Experiments comparing brain activity while reading and while listening find a 98% overlap, i.e., even though it may not be apparent in your child's speech, reading is essentially a language skill. If your child is struggling to build early reading skills, it is likely due to a language processing difficulty.

This difficulty has two primary causes: a lack of focus and/or weak processing skills. Sometimes in the case of attention skills, this will work itself out in the maturing process, and in general, at an early age where attention is an issue, our program is not suitable.

If the problem is processing related, and most of the time it is, our early reading intervention is an ideal choice. We use Fast ForWord to provide intensive exercise of the processing skills require to discriminate between sounds, so that the process of learning to sound out, to decode words, can begin. Skills worked on include:

• Language processing and listening skills by exercising underlying auditory processing skills.
  Auditory processing treatment
  
  
• Phonological awareness
  
  
• Phonemic awareness and letter sound recognition
  
  
• Vocabulary and language structure
  
  
• Learning skills, including the ability to sustain attention, to sequence and to retain key information in working memory

An Individualized Approach

Service Features

Here is how our early reading programs build the fundamental skills required for reading:

Personalized Plan
After evaluating your child's reading readiness, we'll design a personalized plan that draws from a wide range of materials and programs that encourage a love of learning and meet his or her individual reading needs.

Motivational Instruction And Practice
Our early reading program uses engaging and adaptive software that children love. We provide a wide range of incentives and rewards to reinforce the progress being made.

Proven Programs
We'll focus on the building blocks of preschool and early elementary reading including phonics, phonemic awareness, oral comprehension and vocabulary, grade-level skills consistent with guidelines established by the National Institute for Literacy.

Protocols For Early Readers

We can help pre-empt problems in children who have even the slightest of delays in early childhood. An early reading program can make the difference between a successful education and one of playing catch-up. Many of the problems children encounter in the middle grades stem from an inefficient learning process that had not been challenged earlier -- the problem was always there, it is just that the symptoms were not visible.

Very young children (ages 4 and 5) will start Fast ForWord with Fast ForWord Language Basics, where they work on basic memory and processing skills, as well as learning computer skills, to prepare for moving to Fast ForWord Language, the foundational cognitive reading program that the is the heart of our early intervention service. Fast ForWord Language will take most young students, 4 to 7 years of age, two months to complete.

From there, most students move to Fast ForWord Language to Reading and then to the reading series, which works on individual skill gaps, including spelling, vocabulary, and early reading comprehension using sentence completion exercises.
Fast ForWord research based reading program in more detail

Logistics and Outcome Expectations

Our program requires 30 minutes of focus a day. While this can be challenging for younger ones, the software has a computer game feel that early readers like and we have an incentives site called Gemm City to help keep enthusiasm high. Young students typically take the longest to complete our program, average six months, many taking longer.

Results can take a while to develop in our younger students. Early changes tend to be language based -- improved vocabulary, better listening skills, more conversational. We also see improvements in confidence as the phonemes, the sounds inside words that correspond to text on a page start to be distinguishable.

Fast ForWord slows the world down for the preschool and early elementary child, another source of confidence. Decoding skill gains come later, at the 2-3 month mark, and even then, progress can be maddeningly slow as the child, once comfortably processing, needs to go ahead and learn how to read.

While we have a client satisfaction rate of 96%, outcomes vary, depending on the child's personality, IQ, educational environment, sensory and learning makeup, confidence and medical history.