Literacy and Phonemic Awareness
Alexandra is trained in the Wilson reading program which is a multisensory, structured language program that supports reading, spelling and handwriting. Session goals and instructions will be tailored to your child’s specific needs so that they may strengthen their literacy skills!
Emergent Early Readers
Alexandra will work with your little one on important foundational skills before they start to read. These may include:
- Engaging in joint book reading
- Teaching awareness of book reading (top to bottom of page, left to right for English print)
- Understanding that words represent objects, actions, or ideas
- Understanding that text represents spoken language
- Matching speech to print
- Building awareness of environmental print, including
- Building alphabet/letter knowledge, including
- Answering story questions
- Re-telling a story sequence
- Teaching the distinction between drawing and writing
Elementary Level Readers
Formal instruction in reading and writing begins during the early elementary school years. Skills to work on may include:
- Continuing to develop phonological awareness skills including rhyming, segmenting, and blending
- Developing awareness of sounds and syllables in words
- Sight words
- Teaching sound–letter correspondences
- Awareness of spelling patterns in words
- Improving reading decoding
- Increasing reading fluency
- Understanding of story narratives
- Building awareness of story components
- Working on story retelling
- Teaching strategies to determine meaning of words from context cues
- Teaching how to plan before writing and how to edit the final product
- Improving ability to understand and use digital texts
- Improving prewriting, planning, and revising
- Practicing writing uppercase and lowercase letters
- Improving the ability to write brief stories and journal entries
- Developing the ability to write a variety of grammatically correct sentence types
- Improving vocabulary, lexical diversity, and sentence complexity
- Developing skill in using letter–sound knowledge to spell words as they sound
- Improving the ability to spell common words correctly
- Developing the ability to correct some spelling errors
Later Elementary Levels and Older
Some older students might continue to need direct instruction for decoding and fluency. Much of the intervention for this age group uses an “instructional strategies approach.” This approach focuses on teaching rules, techniques, and principles to help gain and use information across a broad range of situations and settings and is based on enhancing metalinguistic and metacognitive skills. Some skills include:
- Use root words to understand word meaning
- Enhancing morphological awareness, including an understanding of how inflectional endings and derivational prefixes and suffixes change meaning
- Developing the ability to decipher complex words related to different academic disciplines
- Improve understanding of content-specific vocabulary, concepts, and content
- Improving the ability to use context to infer meaning
- Understand the main idea
- Paraphrasing information read
- Figurative language and recognition of ambiguities in written text
- Teaching strategies to improve reading comprehension
- Teaching strategies to improve self-monitoring of comprehension while reading
- Teaching strategies to manage different styles of text
- Improving understanding of different text genres
- Improving the ability to use strategies, techniques, and technologies to plan, organize, and complete written assignments
- Research a topic and gather information relevant to writing assignments
- Editing written work
- Writing more complex and grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs
- Improving spelling
