Reading encompasses a variety of skills:  Phonological Awareness, Decoding, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension.  After conducting an initial assessment to determine your child’s current levels of performance, we will target learning objectives and attack them with a variety of strategies during each session.  

• Phonological Awareness – The ability to hear and manipulate sounds in written and spoken words. If your child is learning to read, struggling with decoding, or diagnosed with dyslexia, phonemic activities help strengthen their understanding of letter-sound relationships.  Increasing one’s phonological awareness helps their ability to decode words, recognize word families, and increase their spelling skills.
• Decoding – The blending of letter sounds to read words is the process of decoding.  Working with phonics, manipulative letters, and sight word recognition all help students strengthen these word attack skills.  The more rapidly a child is able to blend sounds and recognize high-frequency and irregular words, the better they will be at decoding words to read sentences, paragraphs, and stories.  
• Fluency – Reading fluency refers to the rate a child reads with accuracy.   When readers are struggling to decode words this impacts their fluency, which in turn impacts their comprehension.  When students aren’t fluent readers they feel self-conscious in the classroom.  Timed readings and phrasing strategies help a child increase their reading fluency. By charting their rate of reading children become aware of their rate and accuracy.  Working with a child on their prosody and inflection while reading will increase their confidence and comprehension.
• Vocabulary – Many times students will be able to decode and read fluently, but knowledge of word meanings holds them back from truly understanding what they are reading. We are able to teach students to look for context clues to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words. We also do work with multiple meaning words, homophones, and prefixes/suffixes to build a child’s reading as well as speaking vocabulary.
• Comprehension –Comprehension is the ability to read for information.  Reading a variety of words and being a fast reader does not mean that a child understands the messages within the text.  When children struggle with reading comprehension it impedes their success in math, history, science, and social studies.  We work with students on explicit and implicit comprehension. In CREW Reading sessions, we will teach your child strategies that will increase their comprehension before, during, and after they have read a story.