Do you remember your struggle to read, speak and write? Well, not all of you might remember that but do try asking your parents about it. You’ll be amazed to listen about the bizarre ideas your parents and teachers used to accomplish that task. Learning these fundamentals in childhood is not an easy walk on the cake for parents and teachers. They have to come up with new ways which would help children to learn. The Northeastern University runs a Speech-Language and Hearing Centre for children. The centre is run by the faculty and graduates of the university. The centre is helping a lot of children in Boston to learn the basics.
The faculty observed some students facing difficulty in reading. This propelled them to devise a game of detectives for children which would help them to read. Some flashcards were made with a picture of a tree and some faces attached to each branch of the tree. The students have to use the elements of the image to determine the phrase depicted by the card, “family tree”.
“There’s a great need in the Boston area for these kinds of services,” says Sarah Young-Hong, the clinic director of speech and language services at the Speech-Language and Hearing Centre.
Not only this but students were also made to learn basics by breaking down words one sound at a time by using two different techniques- RAVE-O reading intervention and Wilson reading training. RAVE-O is practiced by dissecting words to understand their meaning and Wilson reading training works by structuring sentences and attacking the unknown words.
“The program targets the needs of participants by providing the students a well-rounded program that seeks to increase their reading abilities. Kids will hopefully come out of the program more confident to attack challenges and engage in their own learning,” says Young-Hong, who helped to bring Word Detectives to Northeastern last year.
Priyanka Rawat
Comments