SOAR Program
Support. Observe. Achieve. Read.
What is SOAR?
Foundational to our mission is the Family Resource Center’s signature Support Observe Achieve Read (SOAR) program, which provides support to parents and their children’s development in the critical early years. The goal of the SOAR program is to promote early education and school preparedness by providing timely detection of cognitive and motor skill challenges in children from birth to five.
Early detection is made possible by using the Age and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ-3), a recognized and reliable tool recommended by the American Academy of Neurology, First Signs, and The Child Neurology Society. This screening tool assesses a child’s development in communication, gross motor, problem-solving, and personal-social skills. Parents and children enrolled in the SOAR program meet with our parent educators. At these meetings, developmental challenges are evaluated ,detected, and corrected early enough to ensure the child is ready to enter school. Parent educators will provide parents and children with constructive activities catering to each child, books for literacy, and provide informational handouts to help parents take an active approach to nurturing their child’s development. Additionally, by working one-on-one with families our parent educators can distribute more aid to our SOAR families from our distribution center to help them succeed.
Why SOAR?
Compared to programming offered by government entities that provide early intervention programs for infants and toddlers with developmental delays and disabilities and their families, SOAR bridges the gap by monitoring for developmental delays and providing services to children from birth to when they are school age at 5 years old.
We recognize that families in precarious financial and economic situations may find it more difficult to ensure their child’s development due to limited government funding for HeadStart, being waitlisted, or not being able to afford private preschool. Because these families do not have the resources to ensure school readiness, children are more likely to have developmental delays upon entrance into public education. The SOAR program is a contributing solution to an ongoing problem in the Fond du Lac communities.
How to sign up for SOAR.
The SOAR program is free to parents and just requires an in-take form to be filled out at our office. The same form provides parents access to our parent education classes and our distribution center. To sign up for SOAR, parents can email at info@fdlfrc.org or give us a call at (920) 929 – 4110 and express interest in the program. Our parent educators will reach out and schedule meetings working with a parent’s schedule.
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