Bring Home DSRF’s Home Reading Techniques- Free of Charge!
Do you ever wish you could take DSRF’s reading teachers home with you – or to your child’s school, or your parent support group? Good news – now you can.
Thanks to the generous support of Telus and Bell Alliance Studios, DSRF recently launched a three-part series of online reading instructional videos. These FREE videos share the same practical teaching strategies and best practices to optimize the learning success of your child or student with Down syndrome that our teachers use as they work with students on a daily basis. To view these videos please go to: http://www.dsrf.org/programs-&-resources/our-videos/.
If your child already receives reading instruction at DSRF, the videos are an excellent supplement that will allow you to reinforce the lessons your child is learning in their one-on-one teaching time. If you’re not currently involved in the DSRF reading program, the videos will train you to lead your child through the same exercises that they would be doing if they were enrolled with us. Along with the videos, we also offer free downloadable print resourceswhich allow you to immediately implement the various exercises and techniques covered in the videos.
The videos are ideal for school resource teachers, tutors and anyone else who works with your child on their literacy skills. The reading strategies that we present, some of which (the acquisition of high meaning sight words) were originally pioneered by Patricia Oelwein, are proven to be highly effective for individuals of all ages with Down syndrome.
Three videos are currently available:
Successful Strategies for Beginning Readers with Down Syndrome: This 30-minute video outlines our successful strategies for beginning readers and contains both practical ideas as well as footage of these ideas in practice. It is never too early or too late for learning to read and these strategies can be used with very young children to the adult learner.
Successful Strategies – Memory, Phonological Awareness and Beginning Phonics: This 30-minute video is the companion to Successful Strategies for Beginning Readers and supports the next step in reading development. The video explains that students with Down syndrome may have difficulties with auditory memory due to auditory processing difficulties and/or hearing loss, and demonstrates activities that target the development of auditory memory. Strategies to support phonological awareness, the ability to hear sounds and syllables within words and to hear words within sentences, are also demonstrated. Phonics skills, which allow a student to understand the relationship between sounds and letters and use these skills to decode unknown words, are also explored.
Developing Phonics Skills and Reading Fluency: This video demonstrates a variety of activities you can use to support the development of phonics skills and reading fluency. Skills focused on are digraphs and consonant blends, segmenting and blending, and reading fluency.
All three videos are available online now. The full set of videos (along with the accompanying print resources) will also be available on DVD in August 2013; e-mail info@dsrf.org for more information.
