The Beacon Academy Bridge Program was designed specifically for students who have completed a Pre-Kindergarten program but do not meet the age requirement to enter Kindergarten.

 

Bridge Offers an accelerated curriculum of sight word and phonics instruction. One letter of the alphabet is introduced each week and various phonics lessons are centered on it. Various other activities also focus on the letter of the week such as cooking, art, or science lessons. Students write in journals daily.

 

Sight word instruction is part of the Bridge program too. Scholastic’s Systematic Sight Word Instruction for Reading Success is a program that not only ensures that students master more than 100 sight words, but also covers the majority of national and state standards for language arts. The lessons and activities in this program provide the repeated practice children need to develop **automacity** in reading, spelling, and writing sight words, putting them on the road to reading success.

 

The benefits of having a bank of sight words committed to memory are significant for children who are learning to read. Accurate and automatic recognition of these high frequency words enables a child to read more smoothly and at a faster rate, helping the child remember more of what he or she has just read and to make sense of it.