Royal Prep Academy's Foundation & Primary Years Online After-School Program introduces students to the art of the English Language and builds a solid platform consisting of Phonological Awareness, Phonics, High-Frequency Words, Vocabulary, and Language Acquisition skills.
Phonological Awareness is the understanding that a spoken word is made up of different parts and that each of these parts makes a sound. For example, the word bat includes the sounds /b/, /a/, and /t/, and the word batter can be broken into two syllables that make the sounds /bat/ and /ter/. Phonological Awareness is an important building block for Phonics. Readers need to be able to distinguish, or make out, the individual sounds in spoken words before they can fully master matching sounds to letters.
Phonics instruction teaches students how to connect the sounds they hear in spoken words to the letters they see in written words. For example, a student who can connect sounds to letters knows to read “th” in then as a single sound /th/, rather than the sound /t/ and the sound /h/. Students have to learn many different connections between sounds and spelling patterns. In fact, there are so many connections that learning Phonics can feel like learning the rules to understand a hidden code. But this skill is mastered by taking one step at a time, learning one rule and then another, and so on. Once students can make these connections quickly and easily, they can really start to read for meaning.
High-Frequency Words are the words that appear most often in what students read. Words such as the, and, and it are high-frequency words. Because these words appear so often, readers must learn to recognize them automatically. Also, these words are often spelled in ways that can be confusing. Words such as could and there do not follow the rules that connect sounds to letters in most words. Learning to recognize these words automatically helps students read more quickly and easily, which gives them a better opportunity to understand what they are reading.
Vocabulary is the name for the words a student knows. The more words a student knows, the easier it is to understand what they read. Good readers know the meanings of many words. Students grow their vocabularies by hearing and reading new words, talking about words, and being taught specific words.
English - Foundation & Primary Years Online After-School Program
You receive complimentary administration support when you subscribe to a Royal Prep Academy online after-school program.
This includes being able to order teacher-assigned lessons that support the concepts or standards your child is currently learning at school.
Simply, request information from your child's teacher about what they are teaching in class, and we will provide a series of lessons to complement their classroom learning that your child can complete at home, in their own time.
You can also request for us to reassign any lesson that you feel your child may need extra practice to master.
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