Spelfabet

January intensive reading/spelling groups in North Fitzroy

Here in Melbourne’s inner north, we plan to run some phonemic awareness and phonics/reading and spelling small groups in the weeks commencing 13th and 20th January 2020 (the last two weeks of our school holidays).

The groups will be for children in their first three years of schooling. Each will run for one hour per day for a full week, plus children will be given some activities to do at home each day.

The sessions will be held at the Spelfabet office in North Fitzroy (Suite 3, 430 Rae St), and led by Alison Clarke with support from the other Spelfabet speech pathologists, Caitlin Stephenson, Tessa Weadman and Adrianna Galioto.

Children will be expected to attend all five sessions in the week of their group. Each group will include a maximum of six children, and a ratio of not more than three children per therapist, so will be quite intensive. The cost of the groups will be $450 per child for the five sessions. Many private health insurance companies provide rebates for group therapy, but Medicare care plans only apply to individual sessions.

Times will be as follows:

• 9:00am-10:00am targeting children who have done a year of schooling, but are still struggling to blend and segment and thus can’t reliably read or spell words with two or three sounds and simple spellings like “at”, “fun” and “hop”.
• 11.00-12.00am targeting children going into Grade 1 or 2 who can blend and segment a little, and reliably read and spell two and three-sound words like “at”, “fun” and “hop”, but struggle with words with four or five sounds like “jump”, “stop” and “frog”, and with words containing consonant digraphs like “sh”, “ch”, “th”, “ck”, “ng” and “wh”.

Children who are not already on our caseload will need to come in for an initial assessment beforehand, so that we can be sure they are a good fit for one of the groups.

Please email Tessa on tessa.weadman@spelfabet.com.au if you would like to find out more about these holiday groups and/or express interest in bringing a child to one of them.