Get Your Child Ready for Success in Kindergarten and First Grade
Prepare your child for success in kindergarten and first grade.
Learning difficulties and the inability to stay focused can prevent your child from succeeding in kindergarten and first grade. The longer a child experiences academic difficulties, the bigger the learning gap. Early intervention is the key.
Innovative assessments are the first step to academic success:
Determine if your child is really ready for kindergarten or first grade. All assessments lead to programs which give your child the essential skills to succeed in kindergarten or first grade.
What Sets Brighter Beginnings Assessments Apart?
- Most assessments report what your child is missing but don’t tell you what to do. We provide plans for success.
- Most assessments to not identify strengths. Ours do.
- Most assessments do not detect perceptual motor problems in very young children. Ours do. Importantly, perceptual-motor skills are the foundation for all later learning and are vital to academic success. Assessments
How does Brighter Beginnings help children with learning and focus problems?
Most schools and tutoring centers lower the bar and work towards proficiency. We raise the bar and guide your child to mastery. Proficiency, once defined as competence or know how, today means mediocrity. It usually indicates that your child probably has not mastered the material. Many students scoring at proficiency levels have weaknesses that cause serious academic difficulties in the future. Children enrolled in Brighter Beginnnings pursue mastery. Your child needs a strong academic foundation based on mastery, not proficiency.
What specific academic skills are strengthened and how do you do it?
Every child receives training in reading, math, perceptual motor skills and attention. Weak areas are strengthened and strong areas accelerated. Music, movement and other arts are integrated into reading, math, motor skills and science. Young children love this fun-filled multi-sensory approach which stimulates their imagination, increases thinking skills and improves fine motor coordination. Your child will improve weak academic areas and develop a more positive attitude towards school and learning.
Who designs and directs Brighter Beginnings
Judy Smizik, M. Ed., is a master educator and kindergarten teacher with over 40 years of experience who has helped thousands of young children overcome learning disabilites. She is an expert in the diagnosis and remediation of early literacy and math skills as well as perceptual motor weaknesses.
Can you give an example of a struggling kindergarten student who overcame a specific learning difficulty?
David was struggling in kindergarten and could not identify letters or numbers. Test results revealed a child with a low I.Q.
As part of the Brighter Beginnings evaluation, his visual motor skills were assessed – something many evaluations overlook. This area needed help so David was started on a 90 day training program.
Re-evaluated 3 months later by a neuropsychologist, David knew all his letters and basic numbers and his IQ had improved by more than 40 points. Testing showed that although David had a vulnerability to visual motor deficits, the training had helped him get beyond having a visual motor deficit — a big improvement.
Without the intervention, David would have finished kindergarten feeling unsuccessful, frustrated and anxious because he would not have learned to compensate for his visual motor delay.
David’s parents and the school were advised to let him repeat kindergarten. David flourished in his second year of kindergarten and went on to be an all “A” student in the first grade.