Village Glen offers an educational program that is designed to remediate and enhance social, communication and learning difficulties. The program takes into account that students have unique strengths and weaknesses, and often assimilate information in a variable fashion. Village Glen offers a diverse and enriched curriculum, designed to meet the individual learning styles and needs of each student. The programs listed below highlight some of the curriculum options available to students.
SOCIAL SKILLS
One of the most unique aspects of the Village Glen curriculum is its emphasis on teaching social skills development. Social skills lessons are part of the core curriculum, and take place everyday. A variety of curricula is used in order to ensure that all areas of deficit will be covered. Such areas include, but are not limited to, understanding basic social skills, conversational skills, organizations skills, friendship skills and conflict resolution. A few of the programs offered are highlighted below.
GETTING ALONG WITH OTHERS;
TEACHING SOCIAL EFFECTIVENESS TO CHILDREN
The underlying philosophy of this innovative social skills training program is that all interactions are opportunities for children to improve their social behavior and to receive support and positive consequences for doing so. Getting Along With Others stresses that the style in which a teacher of instructor interacts with the students has a dramatic impact on their acquisition of new skills. This program employs a hierarchical system for intervening and modeling pro-social behaviors.
SKILLSTREAMING / THE PREPARE CURRICULUM
The Prepare Curriculum is a series of coordinated educational lessons explicitly designed to teach an array of pro-social, psychological competencies to elementary through high school students. It seeks to teach interpersonal skills, problem solving, anger management and tolerance to a variety of challenged students, including those who are socially isolated. The Prepare Curriculum is based on teaching social skills in a developmental fashion within the classroom, and provides daily homework and parental involvement in an effort to promote maintenance and generalization.
BOY'S TOWN EDUCATION MODEL
Students who have not acquired the social behaviors necessary to effectively and appropriately interact with peers and adults in the school setting often do not achieve academic success. Thus, the Boy's Town social skills curriculum is based on the premise that what often stands in the way of students achieving their potential is not learning or physical limitations, but social/emotional delays. This comprehensive, highly structured curriculum helps students develop social skills through a systematic, developmentally-based program that provides easy to follow rules, role-play and modeling.
LITERACY PLACE
Literacy Place is a K-6 language arts program that offers a research-based combination of systematic skills development, great literature, correlation to state content standards and state-of-the-art technology to make every child a successful reader. The program focuses instruction on four key points: teaching decoding without sacrificing meaning; building strong vocabulary and comprehension strategies; modeling writing through reading; and assessment and evaluation to inform instruction and monitor progress.
MULITSENSORY PHONEMIC AWARENESS PROGRAM
A primary cause of decoding and spelling problems is weak phonemic awareness or the difficulty in identifying individual sounds and their order in words. The key to helping students develop phonemic awareness is the integration of hearing, seeing and feeling so sounds can be discriminated within words. Through practice and repetition, students progress from words containing two sounds, (e.g. “on�) to complex multi-syllable words (e.g. “developmental�).
LANGUAGE!
Language is a comprehensive literacy intervention curriculum for grades 1-12. Language! utilizes a structured language approach that directly teaches all aspects of language arts and presents phonemic concepts in a sequential, cumulative, concept-based format. Students learn how to break written words into their distinct phonemes and to identify phoneme/grapheme associations. Progress is dependent upon concept mastery. The program provides students with practice to master concepts and return to conventional curricula.
THE WILSON READING SYSTEM
The Wilson Reading System is a direct, multi-sensory approach that teaches students the structure of words. Through a carefully sequenced 12-step program, students master decoding and spelling skills. Students work from sounds to syllables, and words to sentences, by hearing sounds, manipulating color-coded sound, syllable and word cards, and by performing finger-tapping exercises. The program is organized around the six syllable types and allows students to learn cumulatively and systematically.
SRA Corrective Reading
SRA Corrective Reading provides intensive intervention for students in Grades 4-12 who are reading one or more years below grade level. This program delivers tightly sequenced, carefully planned lessons that give struggling students the structure and practice necessary to become skilled, fluent readers and better learners. Four levels for decoding plus four for comprehension address the varied reading deficits and skill levels found among older students. Includes a point system based on realistic goals to motivate students who are often expected to fail.
QuickReads
QuickReads is a research-based fluency program that presents a new concept in classroom texts, which are specially created to promote fluency, automaticity and comprehension. These texts support automaticity with the high-frequency words and phonics/syllabic patterns needed to be a successful reader at a particular grade level. Additionally, with topics in two subject areas: social studies and science, texts in the QuickReads program encourage meaning and comprehension.
INSPIRATION
Concept mapping is a process that has been widely recommended for studying content area material and for enhancing the writing process. Inspiration is a powerful computer program that teaches students to visually develop and organize their ideas. Students are motivated to brainstorm and outline for creative writing assignments. The Outline view also enables students to quickly prioritize and rearrange ideas. Students are able to outline a textbook chapter that can later be used as a study guide. Inspiration facilitates excellent study strategies and actively engages students in the learning process.
Write: OutLoud
Write:OutLoud is the easy-to-use word processor that gives immediate speech feedback as students type words, sentences and paragraphs. As students draft their assignment, they see and hear if their writing makes sense and if it is what they wanted to say. Emerging writers experience the connection between the spoken and written word from the writing perspective. Struggling writers use appropriate words as they use editing tools. Developing writers build confidence in their ability to express themselves and all students improve spelling and vocabulary as they edit and revise.
Co:Writer
Co:Writer adds word prediction, grammar and vocabulary support capabilities to any word processor or email program. The result is that students with disabilities produce quality, content-rich sentences. Emerging phonetic spellers get the word they want. Developing writers create good first sentences that are grammatically correct. Struggling students find the right word with fewer cues and all students build vocabulary.
illage
Glen School is an innovative, multidisciplinary and unique
therapeutic day school specifically designed for children
with challenges in the areas of socialization, communicative
and pragmatic language development and peer relations. Many
of the students served at Village Glen experience special
needs associated with Asperger's Disorder, high functioning
autism, anxiety-related disorders and non-verbal learning
disabilities.