Literacy Services | Crucial Read & Write Skills for Your Kids

Services: Literacy

Literacy is a person's ability to read and write. Literacy is a complex constellation of many skills and is crucial to academic success. Since literacy is a complex integration of many skills, it is important to identify which skills are making reading and/or writing challenging for a child. Knowing a child's "reading level" is not enough information to determine how to skillfully support a child's literacy development.

Skilled reading is driven by skills in two main areas: word recognition (pulling words off a page) and language skills (including vocabulary and grammar). This is outlined in the graphic below, called The Reading Rope:

Our team's assessments are comprehensive and allow us to:

Determine whether your child presents with a language and/or literacy disorder
Identify all areas that are making reading and/or writing challenging for your child
Develop a plan for intervention targeting those areas of difficulty
Help you better understand your child's literacy challenges so you can advocate for them in their schooling

Reading Therapy, Reading Disorder, speech and language pathology, speech and language therapist, Ontario Canada

Once we have completed a comprehensive assessment, we can get on the path to stronger reading and writing for your child in intervention. You can think of reading development to building a wall - it has to be built brick-by-brick (taught skills) with strong mortar (explicitly teaching children these skills and giving them opportunities for focused practice with these skills). Unfortunately, this is often a very different approach than your child may be receiving at school which widens the gap between where we want their literacy skills to be and where they currently are.

When being supported by our team in intervention:

We meet once a week (or more frequently depending on the child as more frequent sessions can lead to faster progress) - sessions are focused on the direct teaching and focused practice
- Important note: memorization of words or books is never our approach as this has not been shown to improved skilled reading
We provide home practice to encourage progress and generalization of skills learned in session
We can offer communication regarding areas targeted in intervention with other team members such as teachers and school-board speech-language pathologists

Some other resources:

Do you want to better understand reading instruction in Ontario schools? Check this out.
Do you want to more deeply understand our team's literacy assessment and intervention process? Check this out.
Do you want a list of possible indicators that your child would benefit from a comprehensive assessment? Check this out.
Do you want to know why we don't focus on sight words with struggling readers? Check this out.

If you are sick of your child struggling to read and are ready for a new approach, our team would absolutely love to support you. Complete our quick online form and we'll be in touch! If you have questions about our services, a lot of those questions are answered here!