Literacy

Are you concerned that your child may be struggling with reading and writing because of Dyslexia? Is your child having difficulties with:

• Reading
• Spelling
• Writing sentences, for example with the correct punctuation
• Writing narratives or other texts, such as reports
• Understanding narratives or other texts

Whiz Kids Therapy can help! We provide comprehensive assessment services to figure out why your child is having literacy difficulties, what the difficulty is, and how to help your child achieve their educational goals. Depending on what your child needs, we can provide treatment for:

• Phonological Awareness
• Phonemic Awareness
• Phonics (Letter(s) to Sound Correspondence)
• Word Attack Strategies
• Spelling
• Reading
• Comprehending Texts
• Writing Stories or Non-Fiction Texts
• Using the Correct Punctuation in their Writing

At it’s heart, literacy is the ability to read and write, and the requisite skills underlying the journey to becoming a competent reader (and writer) involves 5 key elements: Phonics, Phonemic Awareness, Fluency, Vocabulary and Comprehension (see http://www.fivefromfive.org.au/five-keys-to-reading). Our speech therapists can assist your child to develop these skills and have experience providing systematic synthetic phonics programs, phonological and morphological awareness interventions, and language development therapy (vocabulary, comprehension, grammar and discourse).

Becoming a competent writer also involves these 5 key elements, and is clearly underpinned by oral language skills, particularly semantics, grammar, the sound system, and pragmatics and discourse. Whiz Kids speech therapists have experience improving writing skills, for both fiction and non-fiction texts. Within our writing interventions we target both the macro (structure and form) and micro structure (grammar, spelling, and use of language) of the text, and meta-linguistic skills (ability to consciously understand how language is used to create meaning).

Writing texts can be particularly challenging for our kids with reading deficits, language issues, or working memory difficulties – our interventions are carefully scaffolded to assist your child gain text development competency.

Our speech therapists have been trained to use evidence-based programs, including the Sounds~Write program (synthetic phonics program) and Talk 4 Writing (writing, reading comprehension and vocabulary development program).

Groups We also run group programs for developing reading comprehension, writing and vocabulary skills using the Talk 4 Writing approach. The groups typically run for a 8 week block for 1 hour per week and can be a cost-effective way to improve your child’s writing skills. We tailor the group to each of the student’s needs – ask us for details about upcoming groups.