Background

Students become conscious of the mouth actions that produce speech sounds. This awareness allows for the verification of sounds within words and enables individuals to become self-correcting in reading, spelling and speech.

Students use a multisensory and kinesthetic approach to sounds - not only do they discover how to produce sounds, but they are given several dimensions to express them. They will be able to make the sounds, describe how they made them, identify the sounds from a visual representation, and then organize sounds in a systematic way according to how the mouth produces them.

NOW! Foundations' emphasis is not on conventional reading and spelling; students instead focus on feeling what the mouth is doing while making individual sounds. Students improve their phonological awareness and phonological processing skills by not only feeling the changes in the sounds of different words, but being able to generate them on their own. Upon completion of NOW! Foundations, individuals may gain several grade levels in reading ability after about 12 weeks of our intensive program (plus or minus 4). Students exit the program with a newfound ability to analyze and reason through language tasks, having developed a greater level of phonological awareness. Even students who have had past speech therapy and have reached a plateau in skills have been able to make gains using NOW! Foundations.

Developing "phonological awareness"

The NOW! Foundations for Speech, Language, Reading and Spelling program develops phonological awareness – the ability to recognize that words consist of a sequence of individual sounds – as well as reading, spelling and auditory working memory skills. NOW! Foundations is based on theoretical models established by renowned researchers and from professionally published research studies of program effectiveness.

Why is this important?

During NOW! Foundations, students engage in the discovery of a unique hierarchy of multisensory activities that efficiently combine very concrete sensory information from the mouth, ears, and eyes. Through these concrete, multisensory activities, students develop a specific knowledge of the mouth movements, auditory sounds and visual features of the sounds of the English language.

Research has shown that exploring language in a tactile, multisensory way greatly improves phonological processing and phonological awareness - two key components to strong written and oral language, and therefore, strong reading and spelling.

Students need strong phonological awareness skills and the ability to use this skill to accurately assemble and segment words. Strong word attack skills help in the construction of strong sentences. And a strong oral language system helps guide a strong written language system.

Results

Overall, after completing the NOW! Foundations program, students may gain several grade levels in reading ability from an average of 6-12 months of online eTutoring (provided one-on-one by highly trained educators). These gains can occur even if a student did not improve reading and spelling skills after tutoring with traditional phonics or reading programs. Best of all, it's online and the student can learn from home.

Students and adult learners exit the NOW! Foundations program with a newly improved ability to accurately analyze, reason through and sound out words during reading and spelling. Also, they commonly improve their functional reading skills in the classroom – that’s the real goal!

Testimonials

"Cam told me "He used to hate reading" and when I asked why he told me "because it used to be hard." I almost cried. He had even began trying to read signs aloud as we drove! These small things, more than anything, solidified that something had changed! I attribute these changes in Cam to the NOW program, as it was the only piece of his educational instruction that had changed. The NOW program helped our son become a better and more confident reader.

Read Cam's full story here!

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NOW! Programs are online – to get started, call (352) 275-5778 or send us an e-mail.