Did you know that Speech Pathologists can identify children who are at risk for reading and spelling difficulties from preschool age, there is no reason to “Wait and See” especially when early intervention is the key to efficient remediation. 

Why Speech Pathologists?
Who better to train a child’s ability to process and identify sounds than a university trained specialist in sounds!!  Speech Pathologists have an in depth understanding of the sound system of English; the way sounds and words are formed (phonemic awareness) as well as how grammatical markers change meaning and pronunciation.  We know the importance of keeping things fun throughout the learning process and know how to think outside the square in order to convey tricky concepts in an easy to understand manner.

Successful reading & spelling involves the following skills:

• Rapidly recognising letters and knowing the sounds that these letters represent.
• Being able to manipulate sounds in a word (eg, take off the beginning sound, or swap the middle vowel).
• Segmenting-Being able to hear and break a whole word up into its individual sounds or syllables; this is a fundamental skill in spelling, especially for unfamiliar words.
• Blending-Being able to hold onto sounds mentally whilst the others are identified and then combine these separate sounds to form a word; this is a precursor skill for reading, especially for unfamiliar words.

Our comprehensive assessment procedure can pinpoint exact areas of strength and weakness in your child’s foundation reading and spelling skills.  We treat children of all ages ranging from the preschool years all the way through to high school.

We aim to assist parents and teachers to help their children keep up with the curriculum whilst building the foundations – to date the results from our phonics based literacy programme and the feedback received have been fantastic and we are in the process of collating our pre and post testing data to display on this site.  Research has proven that the positive changes made following a phonics based literacy programme such as ours are permanent changes, which means that once your child has learnt to process sounds correctly, he/she should maintain these gains.

Our programme is individually tailored to the child based on results from the assessment and parent/teacher reports.  By the end of the programme your child will have improved in the following key literacy areas:
• Understanding the relationship between a letter, a sound and a word
• Knowing letter-sound correspondences
• Segmenting (for spelling) & Blending (for reading)
• Using their improved skills in everyday reading and spelling tasks