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Phone: (480) 991-6560 |
Scottsdale Office: 6865 E. Becker Ln. Ste 101 Scottsdale, AZ 85254 |
Chandler Office: 932 W. Chandler Blvd. Ste 3 Chandler, AZ 85225 |
Reading Intervention
| Does your child have trouble sounding out words when reading? Is his or her reading "choppy," with guessing at words and frequent errors? Is spelling difficult for your child? At Pediatric Speech and Language Specialists, we begin with a comprehensive reading evaluation to determine your child’s specific needs. Or, if current testing results from another source are already available, we will review them with you, and then carefully choose the best intervention approach for your child. One size does not fit all! The trained, experienced reading therapists at PSLS utilize several different reading intervention programs including Systematic Sequential Phonics®, Wilson Reading System®, Fast ForWord to Reading®, SPELL-Links to Reading and Writing, Reading Assistant™, and other programs, depending on your child’s strengths and weaknesses. The most important feature to any program used by our office for reading therapy is a strong multisensory approach, meaning that children will learn to use all of their senses to assist in the reading process. Decoding is broken down, and begins with helping the child develop strong phonemic awareness, or the ability to identify the individual sounds in words and correctly produce them. Individual phonemes are taught and reinforced through "feeling" how the sounds are produced, and once all consonant and vowel sounds are mastered, sounds are sequenced into syllables and words. Another important component to the decoding process is the ability to form and recall mental images of words. Quickly and correctly recognizing and recalling the orthographic patterns in words is critical to fluent reading at an appropriate rate, and accuracy in spelling. Additionally, the rules that govern our reading and spelling patterns are systematically taught and reinforced through frequent practice and supportive home activities. These skills are each mastered at the single syllable level, then extended to the multisyllable level. Finally, reading rate and fluency are developed and strengthened using a variety of materials to generalize new reading skills and provide opportunities for success! If your child struggles to understand what they read and hear, our reading therapists will teach specific strategies to support reading and listening comprehension. As Albert Einstein said, "If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it." At PSLS we help children to form mental images of passages that they read and hear, making it much easier to recall details and understand the gestalt (the "big picture") of the passage. Visualization skills are systematically introduced and strengthened, from the single word level up to full pages and beyond. These skills are directly linked to language comprehension for both reading and listening, as mental images. Additionally, strategies are taught to help with weak vocabulary, such as deriving the meaning of a word from its context. Our goal at PSLS for your child is to fully comprehend the materials that they read and hear, so that they can enjoy this rich experience and become independent, lifelong readers. Call the PSLS office to schedule services at (480) 991-6560. |
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