Reading doesn’t just show up in English class. It’s the key to word problems in math and data analysis in science. It travels with your child to the workplace, where they’ll need to read emails, instructions, company policies, and more.
Reading is a doorway to success. But what happens if your child is having trouble reading? Will they get it eventually? Or is there more going on that needs attention today?
Myths Related to Reading
More Reading=Better Reader
If a child has a reading difficulty, simply reading more books won’t solve the problem. With more exposure, they may learn to memorize more common words, but that doesn’t give them the skills to systematically sound out unfamiliar words.
Whole Language is Effective
Whole language was an approach to reading instruction that was very popular in the late 1980s and 1990s, but it has been discredited–especially for struggling readers. With whole language, the emphasis switched from systematic phonics instruction to a focus on holistic meaning. Students were taught to decode words by gathering meaning from context (surrounding words or images). However, this system breaks down when students can only read a small percentage of a passage. How can a student lean into context clues when they can’t read the context?
Waiting For Kids To Outgrow Reading Challenges
Reading challenges usually continue lifelong unless there is a successful intervention. In the meantime, reading difficulties will affect a child’s performance across the whole curriculum (since reading underlies most school subjects), and the child’s self-esteem will likely begin to suffer.
What Does Work?
Lessons developed with a Science of Reading foundation are most effective when teaching reading. If your child is having trouble reading, there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence to show that they must be systematically taught with an emphasis on the following:
Phonemic Awareness For Early Readers
At the earliest ages, you can begin to teach students to recognize and manipulate the sounds within words. At The Academy of Scholars, we do this by teaching these sounds explicitly, segmenting words into sounds, and manipulating those sounds within words. Over time, children learn to identify and sequence sounds naturally. We start this at the pre-kindergarten level.
Phonics Strategies For Early Readers and Beyond
Phonemic awareness addresses the sounds within words, but that’s only part of the equation. Phonics deals with the correspondence between letters and the sounds they make. Phonics strategies include learning vowel sounds, consonant blends, common prefixes and suffixes, and common spelling patterns. At The Academy of Scholars, a focus on phonemic awareness and phonics is baked into the curriculum from pre-kindergarten on up. It is addressed systematically and repeatedly at every grade level so no child falls through the cracks.
Fluency Development
When children with reading difficulties get the tools to read, they can break down new words of any length, but they may do it in a slow, stilted way. When reading is that labored, children don’t want to do it. And even when they do read, they lose meaning because the flow is so slow.
Along with building phonemic awareness and phonics skills, it is important to build fluency. By teaching kids systematic phonics, they naturally learn to decode words quickly and accurately. The use of explicit phonics instruction helps kids develop automaticity with word recognition and increases reading fluency.
Comprehension
We read to learn, so a strong reading comprehension curriculum is essential for your child’s Atlanta school. Even when a student can decode words, they need a strong vocabulary and exposure to a whole spectrum of content: fiction, historical fiction, non-fiction, current events periodicals, technical writing, and more. By basing lessons on the Science of Reading, children can build strong decoding skills and focus on understanding the text rather than struggling to read the words.
At The Academy of Scholars, we immerse students in high-quality, relevant literature and teach them strategies for understanding it. This includes teaching plot, cause and effect, themes, characterization, drawing conclusions, predicting, and more. It’s all part of our research-based reading comprehension curriculum–and it works!
Language Arts
Reading and writing go hand in hand, and they both operate on a strong working knowledge of language. Students need to understand sentence structure, parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, conjunctions, etc.), punctuation, and research skills. While we’re shoring up foundational skills for early readers, we frame their skills in the broader concept of written and spoken language, be it through books, plays, speeches, emails, and more.
The Academy Of Scholars Advantage For Reading Instruction
At The Academy of Scholars, we give reading instruction the highest priority because we know how high the stakes are. “Today’s readers, tomorrow’s leaders”—it’s more than just a clever saying. It’s the truth. Our goal is to make sure that every student here becomes a proficient reader.
Here’s what sets our reading curriculum apart from other schools:
Early Intervention
While reading can be taught at any age, it becomes much more difficult the longer you wait. At The Academy of Scholars, we don’t just teach everybody to read through immersion and then try to rescue those who needed specific skills instruction all along. Our lessons do not rely on memorization, context clues, drilling, or repetition. Instead, we focus on strategic teaching from the youngest earliest grades so that all aspects of reading are addressed step-by-step.
Trained Teachers
We pride ourselves in the fact that our teachers have received extensive training in our reading curriculum. Too often, teachers know the general concepts behind reading instruction, but they have had no exposure to the specific methods for teaching it. Our teachers are all on the same page with a program that works from Pre-K up to 6th grade.
This is no hodge-podge, arbitrary curriculum that differs from class to class. Teachers instruct from a cohesive, highly successful, research-based curriculum, and students learn skills that build on each other from one grade to the next.
If students are struggling, our teachers know how to identify this and get them the support they need immediately.
Diagnostic Tools
We hear about too many struggling readers who slip through the cracks, often because they are intelligent and well-behaved so that they can mask their reading difficulties. Our staff uses computer-adaptive assessments, that can accurately determine a student’s reading level and skills. Diagnostic tools such as the one described are beneficial for tracking progress, and creating informed instruction or intervention.
Daily Immersion
Reading is not a sometimes thing at The Academy of Scholars. Kids are daily immersed in developing foundational reading skills. It’s who our scholars are and what they do. This continuous exposure allows students to internalize skills and become fluent readers. It also allows for adequate opportunity to master each new concept before moving to the next one.
Evidence-Based Reading Instruction
We do not teach on the basis of tradition (an opinion of “what’s always worked”). We don’t subscribe to every shiny new curriculum that trends. Rather, we used programs backed by years of scientific research. These are tried-and-true programs with extensive data to prove it.
If you’re tired of schools that recommend the same old thing as your child falls farther behind in reading, it’s time to try something new. Visit us today and ask about our proven reading curriculum readers here in Decatur, Georgia.