Children’s Therapy
Literacy: Reading & Writing
Literacy is critical for academic success, especially as students grow and are expected to read on their own in order to learn. We can assess and treat literacy difficulties because of the strong connection between oral language and print.
Improve Your child’s Reading
There are many different skills involved in becoming a successful and confident reader. Our speech-language pathologists can help with the following:
Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic Awareness is a critically important skill under the umbrella of Phonological Awareness. It involves the ability to manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) within words. Examples of Phonemic Awareness include breaking words down into their individual sounds, blending sounds together to form a word, and substituting sounds within words.
Decoding
Decoding is the ability to use letter-sound correspondence to read familiar and unfamiliar words accurately.
Children with Decoding deficits often try to guess words based on the first letter/sound or based on associated pictures.
Reading Comprehension
Reading Comprehension is one’s ability to answer questions that show that they have understood what they have read.
We can help your child answer direct recall questions from a given text, make inferences and predictions, define new vocabulary words, and identify the main idea of the text.
Reading Fluency
Reading Fluency is the ability to read texts accurately at an appropriate rate and with appropriate pitch.
This skill can demonstrate how well a child understands the text as they are reading. Slow and/or effortful reading decreases a child’s ability to make sense of the text.
Improve Your child’s Writing
Writing is an integral part of a child’s learning & development. In school, their performance will be largely based on their Reading & Writing skills.
Spelling, Morphology, and Syntax
All children benefit from learning spelling rules to take the guesswork out of spelling. We can also provide instruction on Morphology (i.e. grammatical markers and affixes at the beginning and end of words that change their meaning) and Syntax (i.e. word order).
We work with children at the word, sentence, and paragraph levels for written expression.
Handwriting
Writing involves the coordination of a number of skills including language comprehension, fine motor skills, visual coodination, and more.
Our highly experienced Occupational Therapists can help children who struggle with sloppy handwriting, letter reversals, cramped or unusually-spaced writing, and much more.
plan for success
At Wonderspeak, we understand how important it is to have your child succeed at home, at school, and at life.
Any of the above difficulties may hinder your child from reaching their fullest potential. We use a structured literacy approach that progressively builds on your child’s skills and is tailored to individual needs, to help them become confident readers & proficient writers.