New Business: Reading Center Hopes to Enhance Children's Learning Experiences

It's no surprise that Jenelle Erickson will soon open a center that intends to help children read more easily. She's been fighting that good fight her entire life.

Erickson, who is originally from Madison, has run the Rainbow Montessori School there ever since she founded it in 1981. She has a masters in reading, and volunteers on the International Dyslexia Association's board. She has also taught in the County College of Morris's remedial reading and writing department.

She doesn't, however, do all this without inspiration. Reading issues hit close to home for Erickson.

"Dyslexia runs in my family, so I've had firsthand experience with it and the struggles it can cause," she said during an interview at her new reading center, called Lil' Reading Scientists. The center is on the main level of the Hickory Square Shopping Center.

The center will offer classes for children ages three to 12. It will offer morning classes for preschool and kindergarten students that focus on literacy, and older school-age children can come for remedial learning courses. Generally, students who need remedial learning will come once a week, though some will come twice a week, depending on how much help they need.

"Children don't progress to the next level until they've mastered the first level," Erickson said.

Erickson's center will teach according to the Orton Gillingham-based methodology, which emphasizes visual and auditory learning, according to its Web site.

Its programs, she said, will provide an important service to the community. About 23 percent of New Jersey fourth-graders cannot read at a basic level, and 19 percent of the state's eighth-graders also cannot. Erickson hopes Lil' Reading Scientists, in some way, will help reverse that trend.

The center offers free screenings "as a community service to help identify children that can benefit from remedial [studies]," as Erickson put it. It will offer screenings from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Feb. 27 and March 6 at the center.

The center's spring session begins on Monday and lasts 18 weeks. Lil' Reading Scientists will also offer two summer sessions.

For more information, see its Web site.