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Our Phonics Program

Every child deserves a champion – an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be. -Rita Pierson
At Shining Stars Academy, we reach for the stars
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"In the summer of 2012, I was doing some research to get ideas for a new set of lessons.  Through this process I came across a program that was unique and taught preschool-age children to read.  I was excited about this, but because of legal reasons, I was unable to use the program.  As I learned more, and did more research, I found that as a general rule, the highest quality of education for preschool-age children was most widely available to higher income families.  In my education as teacher, I had learned about President Lyndon B. Johnson and the values he stood for to provide a high quality of education to children from a variety of economic backgrounds.  Because this was something that I had always stood for, it was at this time that I decided to create my own phonics program to enable me to do exactly that." -Miss Sam  
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Our Phonics Program is both unique and fun in that it utilizes songs, projects, actual lesson time, games, activities, and visual characters and stories to reinforce each letter that we learn.
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In addition we use a variety of teaching methods to reach children from all 4 types of learning:
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Visual learners benefit from the characters, demonstrations, and word pictures from our program.  
Auditory learners benefit from the songs, phonics phones, stories, and lessons.
Read/Write learners benefit from the projects and white-board activities.  
Kinesthetic learners benefit from the songs, crafts and hands-on activities.  
 
At Shining Stars Academy, we use a reading program that was developed by Miss Sam.  Rather than using the traditional method of teaching individual sounds and expecting the child to put them together to make a word, we use a method which teaches blending in conjunction with teaching the sounds of the letters.  Through this, children are learning to read as they learn the alphabet.  
 
We are pleased that we have been using the Shining Stars Academy Phonics Program for 6 years now and it has been extremely successful.  Our success rate for the past five years is that we have 85% of our entering Kindergartners reading currently (January 2020).
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"This program was developed though extensive research and study and I feel that this, as well as my unique individualized learning approach, is what has given the amazing results that I have seen." -Miss Sam
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