Becoming an Excellent Reader is a Simple Process

We begin to read with our ears first. In written English each letter stands for sounds. Say the appropriate sounds of the letters in a word in order from left to right and reading occurs naturally. Sixteen letters almost always make the same sound. They are easily learned.

That leaves 10 letters that make more than one sound. Even first graders can easily learn a few sounds for 10 letters, plus the rules governing them.

Academic Associates™ focuses on those few sounds, teaching easy-to-learn techniques for pronunciation and understanding what they read. Reading becomes a logical, uncomplicated process. If this sounds simple, it's because it really is. We're not saying it won't requre work, because it will. But anything worth achieving does, and this method will help your child focus, learn and succeed!

Learning to read takes place in stages:

1. Decode (read) the word
2. Understand what is read (including vocabulary)
3. Read with fluency
4. Evaluate what is read
5. Retain relevant information

The Academic Associates™ Reading Course addresses all of these essential components. It is taught in incremental steps, each lesson building on the previous one. If one stage is missing, the entire process is rendered valueless.

For more information about this program please visit Academic Associates™.

There are two basic methods of reading instruction:

• The whole-word method teaches by sight or memorizing words as self-contained entities.
• The phonics' method teaches that letters have individual sounds which blend into words.

Very simply, the left part of the brain is where language is processed. The right hemisphere of the brain is where memory takes place. The Academic Associates™ method streamlines a one-way flow of data from the linguistic part of the brain to the memory side, simplifying and accelerating the process of learning to read. With this systematic approach, students learn simple phonetic rules which become tools for pronouncing any word, not just those they have memorized. Regardless of how well sight-readers may read, their skills improve when they learn to process words phonetically.