Early Childhood Reading Programs

Address issues now to avoid problems later

While most children develop essential pre-reading skills through play, daily conversation and interaction, some do not. For these children, an added opportunity to stimulate cognitive skill development using an early childhood reading program can have a profound impact.

Early reading skills require sound foundations — phonics for reading, focus for learning, processing for listening — upon which higher level reading, thinking and reasoning skills will be built.

Early Childhood Reading: Prevention vs. Treatment
Progress in developing the cognitive skills required for reading will vary greatly from one child to the next. While home environment, teachers, family and peers all play a role, these positive experiences are in large part dictated by your child’s listening and learning skills.

Is your 4-7 year old struggling to sound out words? Is there resistance to reading? Are words being guessed or skipped? These are signs that early pre-reading and reading skills are not developing as expected.

While attention-related issues often work themselves out as a child matures, processing issues tend to linger. However, learning to sound out words can only begin once processing improves. This is what our early childhood reading programs do. They work on:

• Language processing and listening skills
• Phonological awareness and letter sound recognition
• Vocabulary and language structure
• Learning skills, including focus, sequencing and working memory

Protocols For Early Readers

Very young children (ages 4 and 5) will start with Fast ForWord Reading Readiness, to prepare for moving to Fast ForWord Foundations, the foundational cognitive reading program that is the heart of our early intervention service. Fast ForWord Language will take most young students two months to complete.

From there, 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.
Our reading software in more detail

Logistics and Results

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.

In early childhood, changes from our reading programs tend to be more language based at first– improved vocabulary, better listening skills, more conversational. Later we see improvements in confidence as the phonemes, the sounds inside words that correspond to text on a page, start to be distinguishable.