I am excited to announce another partnership with Nena Johnson, owner of Circle Speech Therapy, and a local special education teacher Carley Cosgriff to provide reading, literacy, and math enrichment for students who are GRADUATING from 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade this year. Our focus will be to increase reading skills through phonics, increase reading comprehension through literacy strategies, and to increase number sense and fact fluency in mathematics.

What exactly will my child be working on in Math during this camp?

We have three goals for this camp:
1) Increase number sense.
2) Learn academic vocabulary used in math.
3) Work on skip counting to help prepare students for multiplication.

Number sense is the ability to recognize the relationship numbers have with each other.
This includes concepts like more, less, larger, smaller, greater than, less than, and equal
to. It also refers to the ability to put numbers in order and understand how the place
values can affect the value of a number. Finally, it is the idea that numbers can be
represented in different ways. For example, the number 7 can be written as “7,” “seven,”
using an array, or using manipulatives to represent the value.

Mathematic academic vocabulary are those words that a student encounters in math
that give the clues to help solve a problem. Learning those “clue words” at this young age
helps decode directions and word problems. Examples of this include “in all,” “increase,”
“altogether,” etc., all mean that a student should add or multiply the numbers given.

Finally, skip counting is used in most area schools to help students learn their
multiplication tables. Learning this often takes students a little longer, and we like to use
songs to help in this process. When a student puts together that they can skip count
their way through their multiplication facts, it takes away the pressure to memorize each fact quickly. The more they use their tools, the less they have to rely on them, and they
learn their facts more organically.

What will my child learn from Carly during the reading portion?
In the Summer Enrichment Program, your child will work on various phonemic awareness
skills (the ability to hear and manipulate spoken sounds) and phonological awareness skills
(written symbols/letter combinations in text that represent sounds). Exposure to these skills
will occur in a combination of short mini-lessons, and opportunities to practice application
through multisensory and game-based activities. Students will also engage in reading
passages & texts to explore a variety of reading comprehension strategies & skills (eg.
identifying main idea & details, inference, sequencing events, retelling and summarizing).

What will my child learn from Nena during the language portion?
Understanding how words are connected is an important skill in reading comprehension.
This summer, we will be working on how words are connected by working on semantic
mapping (this helps kids draw on background knowledge to connect words they read),
semantic feature analysis (identifying and describing words by specific elements: category,
action, location, parts, senses, unique features), and categorization. We will also be working
on synonyms and antonyms. Another important component of reading comprehension is
inferencing, which is taking information and making an educated guess. We will be playing
inferencing games and talking about why they came to that conclusion.