Literacy
‘Literacy’ refers to reading and spelling skills.
Before children become competent within the areas of reading and spelling, they are expected to acquire a variety of ‘pre-reading’ and ‘pre-spelling’ skills as pre-schoolers, up until grade three at school. Having strong ’pre-reading’ and ‘pre-spelling’ skills will reflect a student that is successful at reading and spelling as they continue to grow.
Children can have difficulty reading and spelling when they have difficulty recognising words as a whole and how they 'look' and instead rely on sounding out words, even those that are increasingly familiar to them. Children can also experience the opposite and tend to memorise familiar words and therefore often mispronounce similar words as they are not sounding out words and are instead reading them as a whole and it can sound as though a child is guessing the words. Speech pathologists utilise reading and spelling programmes to 'fill in the gaps' and assist children to read and write from the 'bottom-up' (sounding out words) and 'top down' (recognising whole words and literacy patterns) to balance their skills and become competent, fast and accurate with reading and writing.
Julia utilises a number of formal and informal assessment measures to test these areas in depth and has training in the 'Spalding - Writing Road to Reading', 'Multilit', 'Reading Freedom' and THRASS methodologies.
Literacy programs are tailored to each individual student between Years 1-12 and cater to varying areas of need, whether it be focusing on pre-literacy or on direct spelling / reading skills.