Learning To Read

Early Reading Intervention For Kindergarten & Older

Is this your child?

• Struggling to attach sounds to letters

• Cannot always identify beginning and/or end sounds of words

• Is starting to resist reading

These are the classic signs of processing skill delays impeding phonological awareness. Left untreated this weakness will impact reading fluency, reading comprehension and even a life long interest in reading.

Learning To Read Is Challenging
Most children start to read by learning to recognize whole words (cat, me, the). However, soon they are encountering so many complex words that they cannot memorize them all. At this stage, they need to develop decoding skills, so they can ‘sound out’ unfamiliar words they encounter. To be able to decode words, a child needs to understand that:

• Spoken conversation can be broken up into words, and words can be broken up into syllables and sounds

• The written letters on a page represent spoken words

• Each letter (or group of letters) represents a sound (or several sounds). For example, the letter 'c' can make a 'k' sound (as in cat) or a 's' sound (as in city), and the letters 'ow' can make several sounds (as in how and low)

• Sounds can be blended together to make words

• Often there are rules that tell us which sound a letter will make (for example, the letter 'c' says 's' when followed by the letters 'e', 'i' or 'y')

Many children pick up these skills easily, either by themselves or with some help at school. However, some children (research suggests up to 30%) need to be carefully taught these skills.

We know that children's reading problems appear early in their school years. These problems do not diminish over time, but persist into adulthood. Children who fall behind in reading for Kindergarten and 1st Grade tend to have difficulty with reading comprehension, and fall further behind in later grades. This results in some adults who have reading problems severe enough to hinder their enjoyment of reading, and limit their career options.

Our Early Reading Intervention

Gemm Learning takes a cognitive approach to learning to read. Fast ForWord software has an early reading intervention approach, emphasizing the phonological awareness, sound discrimination, and other foundational skills required for reading.
Programs to improve reading skills

Gemm Learning students learn to read online, at home with parent supervision and remote educator oversight. The software is adaptive, meaning it mimics learning to read naturally, progressing at each student's own pace -- not too fast and therefore frustrating, but also not slow and boring. These unique adaptive algorithms keep children engaged, working at their limits for that day, providing the intensity required to produce real progress every day.
Early reading intervention programs and service

The Reading Puzzle

Knowing about sounds is important for reading
Phonological awareness, or knowing that words are made up of sounds and syllables, is an important skill for beginning readers. Learning to read requires the ability to notice, think about and manipulate the individual sounds (or phonemes) in words. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in our language that can make a difference in the meaning of a word (as in cat vs rat). Phonological awareness is an auditory skill. A child may have satisfactory hearing but still not be able to recognize phonemes in context.

Many of the children who struggle to acquire reading skills have difficulties with phonological awareness skills such as:

• Identifying rhyming words

• Perceiving the difference between similar sounds (for example, m and n)

• Identifying the first sound in a word

• Remembering the sequence of sounds in a word

• Blending sounds together to form words

• Breaking words into syllables

To understand written text, a reader needs to be able to:

• Read the words accurately and fluently

• Remember what has been read

• Understand:

  • Punctuation markers, such as full-stops and question marks 

  • What each word means, and be able to figure out the meaning of any unfamiliar words

  • How sentences are constructed

  • Differences in types of text (for example, a fairy tale is constructed in a different way to a newspaper article)

  • Use higher-order thinking skills to: understand the main ideas, make accurate inferences and predictions, and evaluate the information

Learning to read is much easier when a child has the cognitive skills needed to master these various reading skills. If you think your child is struggling, consider an early reading intervention like Fast ForWord. In most cases, while the difficulties appear great -- learning to read is not easy -- the underlying skill gap is often small. Resolving that glitch can change a child's life.
Fast ForWord reading program