Fast ForWord incorporates cognitive research and neuroscience. Consequently, the exercises use frequency, intensity and scaffolding to gradually build cognitive and reading ability. These exercises sometimes meet child resistance, particularly when they are working accurately on an area of weakness – which is both frustrating but also exciting as it highlights a real opportunity to transform learning.
Two lesser known but important principles also used in Fast ForWord are:
- Natural learning
- Cognitive loading
Natural Learning
This is the way that humans learn since birth. Natural learners set their own objectives in response to needs, frustration, and curiosity. They find and engage in tasks that help them to learn and seek feedback to monitor their progress and improve their performance.
Practically, this is learning through active discovery, figuring things out.
Fast ForWord is a unique opportunity to learn through discovery, in a world where there is so much instruction. If you instruct your child, you are depriving him or her of the opportunity for a learning success, figuring it out on their own.
So please try to be patient and give your child the time to figure things out.
Cognitive Loading
The limit to the amount of things the brain can engage in is limited by working memory. And in reality, there is a limit to the number of things a brain can attend to at once. This includes only doing to one of decoding words or understanding words.
The brain’s solution is to automate as many tasks as possible. For good readers, decoding is automated, pushed to the subconscious, freeing up the brain for comprehension.
Fast ForWord helps the brain push reading to automaticity, with thinking while reading tasks, e.g., categorizing words where a child is asked to read words and put them into categories while reading.
Child Resistance
These are big and profound skills – natural learning and cognitive loading.
And for many children, they are new skills that early on can frustrate. However, the exercises are adaptive and eventually frustration can turn to progress and success. So please stick with it!
How to talk to your child about Fast ForWord here
