Reading Program

Lakeside Learning is greatly improving the way students learn to read. Lakeside's ReadyRead is an intensive after school reading intervention program for students who struggle with reading acquisition, who are not fluent readers, who do not retain or comprehend what they read, and who are learning to read for the first time. The ReadyRead methods allow students to overcome phonological auditory processing problems commonly associated with children who have reading difficulties. The program uses research-based methods to help these students get on the path to reading success.   

Diagnosis is the essential first step in successfully teaching a challenged reader - the earlier, the better. Children who go through the ReadyRead program early can follow the same express pathway to reading as their classmates. Later-identified children miss out on essential practice, making it more difficult to bridge the gap in their reading deficiencies.

In order to better supplement the learning needs of all types of Readers, Lakeside has recently added the SuccessMaker computerized curriculum. 
  
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The ReadyRead program has three main areas of focus during each instructional session:

1. Phonological Training
At the heart of the ReadyRead program is its phonological focus. Students progress through a set of carefully sequenced, fast-paced activities, designed to build phonemic and phonics skills to the level of automaticity. Automaticity is fast, effortless, and accurate word recognition that is developed out of practice and repetition. Recognizing words at the level of automaticity allows students to focus on higher-level aspects of reading, such as comprehension. ReadyRead's use of pseudo words, or nonsense words, throughout the sequenced activities forces a student to use correct letter-sound relations. When students have difficulty sounding words out, they will often rely on coping strategies that are ineffective for learning to read. Guessing at words and using context clues are two examples of coping strategies.  

2. Active Reading
Fluency and comprehension are a large focus of the ReadyRead program. During each session, students read carefully selected, age-appropriate books that incorporate the sounds and words they covered during the phonological training part of the program. Different reading strategies are used to build reading fluency and comprehension, as well as overall enjoyment toward the reading of books. Many of these strategies give the student the opportunity to hear what fluent reading sounds like and practice fluent reading without the pressures of reading in front of a large group. Our students' confidence and motivation towards reading increases greatly when they are able to apply the sounds they learned to the words in a book.

3. Active Writing
The final area of focus for each session of the ReadyRead program is the Active Writing portion. For many young students, writing sentences or paragraphs is a daunting task. Our instructors alleviate the student's concerns through effective strategies that break the writing process down into very simple steps. Students progress through different levels of Active Writing based on their accumulating skill set. The levels range from basic penmanship, or how write letters neatly and correctly, on up to the creation of small story books with full illustrations. Over time, we find that many of our students look forward to this aspect of the program the most.


Students in the ReadyRead program make significant academic progress
in the following areas: