LAY THE GROUNDWORK FOR A LIFTIME OF READING

At school, reading is the essential tool for success in every subject, so it is vital that you lay the proper groundwork for your child.

According to Bernabe Feria, an expert in reading sciences who holds a doctorate from Oxford University, children learn to read in three stages. They are as follows:

* Stage 1: This stage typically lasts until children are 5 or 6 years old. Children in this stage learn to recognize and write the letters of the alphabet and use punctuation, and also begin “sounding out” clusters of written letters that form short words.

* Stage 2: This stage continues until children reach age 6 or 7. They learn to recognize a few hundred words on sight immediately and to read in phrases and even whole sentences.

* Stage 3: Children reach this stage around age 8 and typically no later than 10. At this stage, they learn how to read with the facility and fluency with which they use spoken language, and should be able to recognize, appreciate and emulate finely crafted language.

As a parent, you can help your children learn the value of reading at any stage through an innovative program called ReadEnt, developed by SFK Media Specially for Kids Corp.

The program’s Reading Movies seamlessly blend reading with interactive films that teach and improve vocabulary and comprehension. Each of the Reading Movies – “Trojan Horse,” “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “Tales of Gulliver’s Travels” – exposes students to timeless children’s literature while helping them learn through a patented technology called “Action Captions.” As the movie character speaks, the words simultaneously appear on the screen, one at a time, with no disruption to the flow of the movie.

Reading experts and educators indicate that these “Action Captions” activate the cognitive elements of the brain so that the development of both reading and spoken language skills takes place naturally. The ReadEnt reading programs can be used over a period of years to develop different skill sets as children move from one stage to the next.

The program’s Reading Movies, which are interactive with fun quizzes and games, are available for use on the TV or the computer.