Our Story
The Grantham sisters, MaryJane Grantham and Marsha Grantham are the proud owners of Reading Gym Inc. We started out small about 10 years ago, working with 3 kids per week out of our home office. Our staff consisted of MaryJane, Marsha and Sasha (our Yorkshire Terrier). We have had great results with our kids, and our business continues to grow.
Marsha Grantham
Our Mascot Sasha
MaryJane Grantham
We currently have 4 commercial locations in the Niagara Region of Ontario, Canada. We have 20 staff members (including SLP's, CDA's, teachers) with 300 kids per week across all of our locations.
More than 6,000 children
have benefited from the program
with success!
As more and more kids came to us, we realized that they couldn't read because they didn't know their letter sounds and therefore could not "sound out" words phonetically. Alternatively, many times when kids were able to "sound out" a word correctly, they were unable to write the word because they didn't know how to print the letters from memory.
Parents often said that their kids had had their vision tested, their hearing tested, and had extra support at home/ school, but still didn't know their letters. We discovered it's not that easy to teach the letters. We needed to figure out a way to teach the letter sounds by attaching meaning to the learning. Although we aren't artists, we started to draw the pictures in the shape of letters. For example, the letter "h" was in the shape of a horse. Wow, the kids were really starting to grasp it!
With this in mind, we developed a fun, multisensory sound/symbol correspondence and printing program that has worked wonders in our clinic!!!
We developed a variety of 5-10 minute activities targeting sound/symbol correspondence in a circuit training format, keeping kids busy, happy, and engaged for the duration of every visit. Our sessions are "Coach-Led", with our Sasha Mascot being the star of the show.
Today, Reading Gym is getting bigger than our clinics can handle. Our goal is to make literacy accessible to all. We are making our Reading Gym Products available to:
Parents, Schools and Preschools, Healthcare & Private Practitioners Including SLP's, CDA's, OT's, PT's, Psychologists, ABA and ABI Facilitators, Special Education, ESL/ELL, and Reading Specialists
Our mission is to give children the help they need to learn the foundational skills to get them ready to read and write.
Committed to making literacy fun and engaging
As former gymnastics coaches, we see great value in the combination of hard work and productive play. And our programs and services embody these values.