We often hear about children who cannot hear the differences in sounds at either the starting level or soon after. This can cause frustration and push back. Sky Gym and Moon Ranch are most common exercise to cause difficulty, but there are others.
Please know, this difficulty is exciting!
It’s exciting, because it means you have most probably discovered the source of your child’s learning or reading delays. If your child cannot hear the sound difference, then she is also not hearing the sounds inside words – impacting phonemic awareness and phonics – and this is the source of your child’s delays.
In addition to identifying the source of delay, your child is working on a program that can help rectify these delays.
The program is adaptive. Once your child’s processing develops sufficiently to catch up with the sound differences, it will present those same sound sequences or syllables at faster and faster rates, ending at natural language speed.
What if your child is stuck?
Sometimes the challenge is pure auditory processing skills and sometimes for younger children it’s a difficulty converting auditory trials into a visual response.
We have a number of intervention ideas to help your child get going or break through to the next level. The interventions are included on each of pages for the Fast ForWord program. Click on the list here, navigate to your program and look for interventions for the exercise or exercises in question.
We have separate pages for the two most challenging processing exercises – intervention ideas for Sky Gym here and Moon Ranch here.
If you have questions or concerns, please contact your program manager.
Note, for younger children, we have interventions that help your child connect auditory sound sequences to visual up and down arrows or left and right icons. If those interventions are still frustrating, we may suggest a 6-month pause in the program, to allow time for that auditory to visual processing skill to mature and develop.
Pro Tip: Don’t Give Up – It Will Become a Positive!
Many if not most struggling learners are fragile. They are somewhat beaten down by repeated failure and frustration, and so when a child realizes the sounds in our exercises are hard to process, avoidance behavior can kick in.
However, the key to your child’s learning future is embodied in these exercises:
- Progress can remediate delays
- Progress can be a source of confidence and self-esteem
We have a number of children who tell their parents they are “good at Gemm Learning.” That’s pride that comes from struggling at first, knowing Gemm Learning is not easy, but then getting going. Once they started on the exercises, they are able to keep pace with the gentle but steady progression in speed and complexity.
This turns a negative, another source of frustration into a wonderful reward!
It shows your child they can succeed. It’s a learning experience that we see applied to other aspects of life. It’s a profound development. And best of all, that progression is gradually remediating the impediments that were holding your child back.
