Helping learners improve their literacy abilities, while providing the education needed for everyone to be a reader.
Program Details:
Early Literacy at AIM begins with individual speech and language sessions starting as young as babies and continuing to age 22. Some children ages 2.5 to school age will access the Bridge program.
The Speech Language Pathologist and the Bridge Program Team at AIM are a child’s first organized exposure to enriched literacy programming opportunities to meet specific literacy goals. An assessment tool for emergent readers has been developed by the Down Syndrome Research Foundation in Burnaby, B.C. and has been adapted for this purpose.
The children are continuously assessed as they progress through the early literacy goals. The Bridge team and SLP’s are constantly updating the assessment files and communicate regularly with caregivers and the Literacy team as to the child’s progress along this continuum. Once the child meets most of the goals for an emergent reader, or is age 6, discussions will take place with the SLP, Literacy Teacher, and caregivers regarding accessing individual literacy sessions.
Everyone a Reader is a reading program that offers individualized reading instruction to learners at all levels of reading. Learners are assessed during the first few sessions of individual literacy instruction, using an assessment tool adapted from the Down Research Foundation in Burnaby, B.C. Goals for the literacy sessions are then established in collaboration with parents and will be communicated and assessed on an ongoing basis. Broad areas of goals include: student engagement, print awareness, expressive and receptive language, phonemic awareness, phonics, high meaning, high frequency words in context, reading and listening comprehension, and written language.
Individual literacy sessions are held once a week or once every two weeks for 30-45 minutes, depending on the learner’s age and ability. Every literacy session includes the following components: alphabetical code, phonemic awareness, high-meaning high frequency sight word acquisition, and reading or listening comprehension.
Older readers, who are at a fluent level of reading, may have the opportunity to move into a group setting to work on strengthening their independent reading and comprehension skills.