Sending your child to kindergarten is a big step for everyone involved; we are here to make that transition a little less nerve-wracking. This group can include a parent whose child has been identified as having a problem and is struggling in Kindergarten or a parent of a preschool child who has already been identified. A parent whose child does not have identified concerns but wants to give him or her an edge is also welcome.
We specifically target skills of the Common Core and ELL/Literacy Standards to successfully develop symbol imagery for reading and spelling. According to these standards, teachers are allowed to “consider ELL students’ English proficiency, English reading ability, content reading knowledge, and background knowledge when deciding on an appropriate literacy program.”
Children with weak symbol imagery may have difficulty with perceiving sounds in words rapidly and are often slow to self-correct their own reading errors. According to the Seeing Stars curriculum of LindaMood Bell that we use here at Metro East Therapy, this causes weakness in:
- Memorizing sight words
- Sounding out words
- Orthographic awareness
- Phonemic awareness
- Contextual reading fluency
- Orthographic spelling
In this group we use combinations of drawing, dictating and writing for children to:
- Create opinion pieces
- Compose information driven/interpretive texts
- Put together stories (both fictional and non-fictional)
- Recount events chronologically and react to said events
- Increase phonetic awareness skills to help visualize sounds and letters
- Increase language skills by participating in written or spoken activities about literature
- Read and spell common high frequency words
- Participate in emergent reader texts with purpose and much more!