It’s the cognitive programs that set Fast ForWord apart – Foundations 1 and 2, Elements 1 and 2. This is where the magic happens! Cognitive skill gaps that are holding your child back are addressed, setting your child up for lifelong growth and success.
Every day on a cognitive pre-reading program is precious for your child. If you want your child to swim, you start by getting him comfortable in water, able to float and tread water. Then the swimming instruction can start.
Reading and learning is the same. First your child needs to be comfortable with language and have the cognitive skills, like focus and working memory, needed for reading comprehension. This is the cognitive programs. They create the platform upon which all future reading and learning skills can be developed.
Here’s why the Fast ForWord cognitive programs are so important.
Reading requires language mastery
For the vast majority of struggling readers, the issue is not the text, it’s how they process language. They are not able to accurately make out all the individual sounds inside words, that’s their gating skill gap. And so, for instance, because your child does not hear the |n| in /tent/ when she see “tent” on a page, she does not recognise it as a real world, certainly not a word she’s ever heard before.
This accurate processing of language, adding pixels to the sound, is a primary goal of the cognitive programs and it’s transformational – not only for reading, but also listening and thinking, both of which are language-based skills also.
This is transformational for many of our children.
Reading is not easy until it’s automatic
Not only does a child need to pick out every sound (phoneme) in every word, that processing needs to be automatic, effortless. If it requires any concentration at all, which for most of our students coming in it does, then everything else suffers. Decoding is slow and labored and comprehension is impaired because the brain is occupied making out language sounds.
The most famous Fast ForWord brain studies show that the cognitive programs build automaticity. Post-Fast ForWord fMRI brain scans show that activity while reading goes from being all over the place coming in (meaning multiple strategies are being used to try to read) to much more concentrated activity in the language areas of the brain. This concentrated activity is the brain mapping what it now hears clearly to text, a process which is automatic and takes very little concentration.
This is another transformational benefit of the cognitive programs.
Reading comprehension requires focus, memory and other cognitive skills
If your child has not been processing language properly, other cognitive skills are not being practiced and so not develop as expected. The Fast ForWord cognitive programs work on a range of cognitive skills needed for reading comprehension. These pre-reading skills include:
- Processing – improved processing enables phonological awareness, the most fundamental of all pre-reading skills.
- Attention – children need to learn how to stay engaged, to stick with reading for sustained periods AND how to resist distractions.
- Sequencing – syllables inside words are sequenced, sentences are sequenced, stories are sequenced. It’s such a pivotal skill in the learning to learn process.
- Working memory – children need to learn to hold information from a teacher or while reading in their mind while taking in more information, and then applying that knowledge for better understanding.
Again, children who have had a hard time listening effortlessly tend to have gaps in these essential pre-reading skills. The Fast ForWord cognitive programs work on these skills.
Where the Fast ForWord reading programs fit in
Once the cognitive pre-reading foundation is set, your child will then move to the reading programs where the goal is to apply these new skills to make reading more efficient and to boost reading comprehension.
The focus is reading-specific skills, in part looking to correct bad habits. For instance, now that your child has the phonological awareness to decode every word, he can start reading left to right. This is new for many children who are used to picking out the words they know and treating each sentence like a puzzle!
Other reading-specific skills include know the “red” words (the ones that are not phonetic), vocabulary, thinking while reading, and making inferences while reading.
Again, none of these reading exercises will take hold until the cognitive skills are properly in place.
What to do next
Explain the value of the cognitive programs to your child – here are some ideas of how to explain things.
Then, have your child sign a pledge to get some buy in.