For most children, the exercises are engaging enough in the first 2-3 weeks to keep get your child on a routine. After that you will need to apply a combination of incentives and active managament.
Incentives
First, do your best to get buy in from your child. For ideas on how to talk to your child about the Gemm Learning journey go to this page. A second step here is getting your child to sign an actual pledge – yes, I understand, and yes, I want reading to be easier and to do my homework more quickly.
Second, figure out an incentive plan. Here is a page with incentive ideas.
How to Keep Track/Maintain Momentum
While the software goes to great lengths to be engaging, there’s a lot of competition for your child’s attention. And so sometimes, it’s about you seeing the big picture and the transformational opportunity of our program, if your child can stay with it.
This can result in creating a set of minimum expectations for your child. And unlike silent reading, where you can never quite be sure how much reading is actually being done, Fast ForWord keeps all kinds of data. The progress emails you get have all kinds of details about your child’s activity:
- Participation – are the exercises being opened, and then are clicks happening, is your child actually engaging with each exercise. We have clear expectations of the number of clicks should occur in each session.
- Individual Exercises – these reports give you an insight into if there is an exercise that your child might be struggling with, that is tainting your child’s access to all of the exercises. Every program has its own My Gemm page with intervention ideas to help overcome blockages that occur in some exercises.
It might also be helpful to listen in while your child works to see if you can pick where the difficulty lies. A good idea here is to buy a headphone splitter – more on these here.
If the difficulty persists, contact your program manager. We can set up a remote virtual session where a program manager can listen in and provide intervention ideas.
Pro Tip: It is very seldom that these flat periods continue indefinitely. And we won’t let that happen. If your child is young, it could be that a 6-month break is appropriate to allow for more processing maturation. If your child is older, we will find a way to resume progress.
Flat Periods
The Fast ForWord completion charts are amazingly helpful. If you see a flat patch in any single exercise, get on it. Look at the interventions, ask your child what they are finding hard, speak to a program manager. These flat periods are common and to be expected, not unlike a high jumper making progress to higher and higher levels. The important point is to try to be proactive and help get your child moving again.
How We Manage Protocols
You are not alone here. We review every student’s progress every day. We see the progress, we see the flat periods. It is true we tend to err on the side of patience, to give your child’s brain a chance to figure out what needs to be figured out. There’s real value in that.
But sometimes action is needed. First, the interventions mentioned above which you can find on every program page in My Gemm. Beyond that we might change the program protocol, including adding in a mix of exercises your child should handle more comfortably. This is called blending. More on blending and how we manage programs here.
