Book Club

Interacting with beloved books in an engaging environment is the key to fostering a life-long love of reading. In this class, students will think critically, reflect and share while reading a novel appropriate for age, reading ability, and interest. Each week will involve shared reading, deep-diving discussions, critical analysis, and engaging activities. This course will teach students to form opinions and to find and cite evidence directly from the text to support those opinions. Digging deep into the story will reinforce previously learned story elements (characters, setting, conflict, plot, and theme) and peel away layers to expose character development and point of view. Additionally, students will learn multiple context-clue strategies to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary. Finally, students will learn to write a constructed response to literature. This exploration will increase students’ comprehension and ability to discuss reading in a cohesive, high-level manner, all while having a blast! 

Short Story Writing Boot Camp

In this course, students will uncover their inner storytellers. By the end of this course, each student will have authored a riveting short story that includes all elements of excellent writing. By dissecting the components of a great short story, students will leave this course with honed skill sets, a love of storytelling, and pride in their work. Skills covered will include story elements, active voice, figurative language, word choice, varied sentence structure, verb tense, and dialogue punctuation. Each lesson will include guided practice, active discussion, and collaborative games and exercises. We will use multiple texts and books, What a Writer Needs, by Ralph Fletcher, and Pixar short films as mentor material. Independent writing will occur between classes. Weekly “office hours” are available for students to individually conference with Robin about their writing. Classes will use the Zoom platform, Google Classroom and Docs. 

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S.M.

We started our son in speech therapy at Language Lab after seeing the incredible progress his older sister had made there when she was struggling. He had been making regular improvements for over 6 months when the pandemic hit. I was worried about what would happen with his speech therapy, but the teletherapy sessions have been wonderful. He gets excited for his sessions and has quickly learned the routine, and Missy has been so creative about finding ways to stimulate his speech across a computer screen. After each session, we can see the effects – he is more talkative, he uses longer sentences and a broader vocabulary. His preschool closed in March, so I find that these sessions are also really helpful in extending that early learning that has been missing in the past few months, which is an added bonus! Thank you Missy!

R.B

When the coronavirus pandemic hit New York, our song has been doing speech therapy at Language Lab for about two years and had made tremendous progress. With no date in sight for when we would return to in-person sessions, I was very concerned that we would lose all his gains; however, the opposite has happened, and he has continued to improve before my eyes. Diane is so understanding and incredibly good at getting him to remain focused and work hard during the session. She is creative about finding ways to use his interests to keep my son engaged as she challenges him to improve his sounds and articulation. My kids have done many Zooms and the ones with Diane are definitely of the highest quality.

K.R.

Our daughter began at Language Lab at 2 yrs old, and over the 2 years that have followed, we have been incredibly grateful for the progress she has made working with Missy. When we began Zoom sessions in March, we felt trepidatious about the change and whether or not the process could be as productive as in-person sessions. However, it was quickly revealed that the same spirit of warmth, patience, encouragement and structure continue in an effective way, and have provided much-needed consistency for all of us during this moment of upheaval.