When you hear "Literacy", what comes to mind first? Letters? Books? Academics?
What if I told you literacy is much more than that! It is a combination of skills that allow people to function in society. It is the ability to converse with co-workers about world events that you read about in the morning news, it is the ability to read health information in order to care for yourself and your family, it is the ability to process words and understand what you are reading. Literacy is key component to working and interacting with society. Unfortunately, according to UNESCO approximately 1 in every 6 Canadians is illiterate.
Why should we be so passionate about teaching literacy to our kids? Why should we dedicate the time to teach the rules of reading instead of just exposing them to text and books? Because kids are the future generation and in such a digital age as today I believe we are seeing literacy go to the wayside. Kids are able to retrieve information through other means (such as watching and listening) and are not practicing the skill of reading nearly enough. We are loosing the fundamentals and we are seeing the impact this has on academics and ones occupation later in life.
Here are Empower Communication Services, literacy is a passion of ours! All of our Speech-Language Pathologists have additional training in this area and understand the value of direct teaching- we teach the rules of reading, how to blend and segment words. Reading may appear to be an easy skill to learn, but often it is not. In order to read a child must have:
Letter knowledge (letter names and sounds)
Phonemic awareness (the ability to blend and segment, to know how many syllables are in a word)
Visualization skills (the ability to see what words look like and how the sounds are ordered in the word)
Memory skills (the ability to recall sight words and the rules of reading)
Comprehension skills (the ability to understand what was read)
There are three known specific learning disabilities and reading is one of them- let's change that! Let's provide the future generation the skills needed to succeed!
Contact us today if you have concerns about your child's ability to read!
Article Written by: Melissa Gagnon