Preparing Children for Academic Success™ Est. 2000

Gwen Easter is the owner of Safe Haven Early Childhood Preschool Education Academy, which has been licensed accredited through NDHHS established since 2000. Ms. Easter is the founder of Safe Haven Community Center, a 501 (C) 3 nonprofit agency established in 1999 and housed in the same building. 

 Due to her own school and community experiences God gave her the vision to start her one of kind trail blazer daycare academy and organization to help children, adults and families with the help of staff, and volunteers through out the years.

She created an Early Childhood and Preschool program to prepare children for kindergarten. 

Kids Can Read™  Tutorial program to support struggling school age readers and children with dyslexia while attending her academy.  

Her organization provides other services such as the Early Childhood & Parent Network to inspire, educate, and advocate for parents and childcare providers by providing education conferences, trainings and education policy and legislation issues. 

 R.E.A.D.S. (Right to Educate advocate for Dyslexic Students).  

She is a child and family advocate, certified dyslexia advocate, consultant, tutor, dyslexia education trainer and activist for policy and legislation change on early childhood intervention and prevention for dyslexic children. 

Her organization offers a Home Intervention Referral Service to help support families and individuals dealing with homelessness or housing crisis situations.  She has organized Safe Night Youth Rallies since 1999 with the help of volunteers.

 She has been appointed by Governor Ricketts of Nebraska to be a member of the Early Childhood Interagency Coordination Council for 2nd term to be the representative for Family Child Care providers. 

She is currently appointed by Governor Ricketts to African American Council to support black families in the areas of education, housing, welfare, economics and other matters as needed. 

 She is a child & family advocate, certified dyslexia advocate, consultant tutor, dyslexia education trainer and activist.

Ms. Easter started working in the childcare industry at the age of 16. She has prepared children for kindergarten and tutored children and adults in reading for approximately 24 years through her academy, and organization.

 She was a member AmeriCorps Vista volunteer tutor and program organizer. Ms. Easter tutored for Omaha Public Schools various tutoring programs, OPS OOIC Adult Education GED/Literacy class and other local organization and churches from 1998-2000 which is where she realized more than half the children and adults, she worked with could not read, write and had a learning disability dyslexia.  During that time schools and many parents did not want to acknowledge the learning disability dyslexia and so her daycare academy and organization continues to support children and adults.

Research shows the two best predicators of early reading success are alphabet recognition and phonemic awareness (learning of sounds) and therefore all children can benefit from multisensory teaching and early intervention and prevention to gain academic success.

Facts:

Dyslexia is a language processing disability that affects reading, phonemic awareness, spelling, writing, comprehension, fluency and vocabulary.

Dyslexia affects 1 in 5 children and adults. That’s 20% of the population. In every classroom there are 2-3 children who probably have dyslexia.

All children can learn to READ if researched based curriculum is used and   the right remediation methods and accommodations. Knowing the warning signs is key to early intervention. Here are a few but not limited. If there are more than 3 warning signs you should consider learning more about dyslexia.

Some Warning Signs of Dyslexia Preschoolers 

· Delayed Speech 

· Chronic ear infections

· Constant confusion of left and right, tie shoes, trouble memorizing alphabet, rhyming phone 

· Mixing up sounds and syllables in long words

 Some Warning Signs of Dyslexia School Age

· Letter or number reversals past the end of first grade, Terrible Speller

· Slow reading, memorize a sequence...