Readers for Life

Based on well-defined research, Readers for Life is a comprehensive program that empowers children with a broad-based understanding of literacy and phonetics. Our program fosters God-given creativity, curiosity, and imagination through purposeful play. This allows a young child to naturally progress through the stages necessary for reading.  

Reading Progression

Wouldn't you be excited if your child loved reading? Our program uses constructive play as a learning tool that allows children's reading development to progress at their own pace and encourages them to become Readers for Life! The following gives a general guide to a child’s reading development.

Emergent Readers

This describes many children in Prekindergarten as they read by contextual cues and memory. They are just beginning to develop phonemic awareness which involves hearing and identifying letter sounds. 

With emergent readers, teachers help students discover and explore various parts of a book. They point out how the pictures go along with the story and that words have meaning. Teachers will introduce a letter of the day, and encourage children to listen for that sound throughout the day. The class may act out that letter while saying the sound, using their entire body to help reinforce that phoneme (sound).  Children manipulate letters and books and reenact learning during their time together.

Beginning Readers

This describes many children in Kindergarten who rely heavily on contextual cues and memory but are building a greater alphabetic understanding. They are able to identify initial and final sounds and are developing their ability to identify medial sounds, blends, and digraphs.

Beginning readers are encouraged to look at the print that is all around the classroom. During calendar time the class begins to recognize familiar words like January and Monday. They’ll notice that the teacher writes from left to right and will participate in activities that begin to put phonemes together to create a simple word, like hat. At this level of development, however, hat will often be confused with hit and hot. Sorting objects based on beginning or ending sounds and letter scavenger hunts are both tools the teacher may use at this stage.

Developing Readers

This describes many children in First Grade. Children are growing their sight word vocabularies and are able to decode new words using their understanding of phonics. They develop a working knowledge of the alphabetic writing system and are becoming fluent in reading and writing.  

A teacher of developing readers may have children sort groups of words with the same middle sounds. Students will begin reading everything they see, noticing letter patterns all around. Teachers will assign independent reading and writing, as well as work with reading groups. Sight words are taught within the context of sentences and stories.

Vocabulary

Through each developmental stage, children build phonetic knowledge and strengthen early vocabulary, the biggest predictor of reading success. As vocabulary develops, children progress from unknown words to a receptive vocabulary in listening to stories, and then a productive vocabulary that increases reading comprehension. The structure of our program gives opportunity to build vocabulary, not in isolation, but in a rich and contextual learning environment.

Unique!

Your children are fearfully and wonderfully made by God and each one develops uniquely. At Spa Christian, we encourage students to progress naturally through their learning and development. Our low student-teacher ratio gives us the opportunity to implement differentiated instruction for all learners.  

DID YOU KNOW?

- NASA’s hiring policy gives high priority to those who have a creative play background in their youth.

- There are no long-term gains in the demand that children read by 5.

- Children who are creative are more likely to be better self-motivators, strategic  thinkers, and more prized employees.

- The rise of ADHD and high levels of aggression can be traced back to unrealistic academic expectations in lower grades. 

Research shows that children who engage in complex forms of socio-dramatic play have greater learning skills than non-players, better social skills, more empathy, more imagination, more subtle capacity to know what others mean, more self-control, and higher levels of thinking.

Additional Resources:

www.naeyc.org/play

http://prospect.org/article/place-play-0

www.seenmagazine.us/articles/article-detail/articleid/3238/reading-at-five-why.aspx

www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/kindergarten_report.pdf