Fast ForWord Language Basics

Introduces Familiarity with Print

Fast ForWord to Reading Prep series of exercises builds pre-reading skills, with a focus on phonemic awareness, phonological awareness and the alphabetic principle. It is designed for early literacy development, helping students who are having trouble moving from the spoken word to the written word.

Based on research of how the brain learns, Fast ForWord to Reading Prep exercises use exclusive patented technology to help students build cognitive skills in the context of essential pre-reading skills including: 

• Letter recognition and naming 
• Phonological awareness 
• Letter sound associations 

Fast ForWord Reading Prep is the initial program in the Fast ForWord to Reading series. It continues to develop the essential cognitive skills of memory, attention, processing and sequencing, or Learning MAPS, which are critically important prerequisites for successful reading. 

Fast ForWord Reading Prep consists of six exercises:

Coaster  A haunted coaster ride helps students develop letter-sound association skills and build an initial understanding of the alphabetic principle.
Houdini As Houdini works his magic cards, students associate letters with sounds to develop phonological awareness skills, including phoneme analysis and phonological working memory.
Hungry Tummy By feeding the hungry bear, the student learns to follow verbal instructions as well as improving verbal decoding and working memory skills.
Inside the Tummy The friendly bear invites you to click and drag the colored shapes into the matching outlines in his big tummy.This exercise develops visual attention, pattern recognition, auditory perception, eye-hand coordination and fine motor skills.
Packing Pig Goes to Work Helping the Packing Pig to identify which letters should be gift-wrapped develops letter-name association skills while reinforcing visual attention, hand-eye coordination and auditory working memory.
Packing Pig Has Lunch While helping Packing Pig get his lunch, a student improves auditory working memory and visual spatial memory abilities while further developing letter-name association skills with uppercase and lowercase letters.

• Pattern recognition
• Auditory Perception
• Phonological awareness
• Following verbal directions
• Verbal decoding
• Color, shape & size identification
• Letter name association with upper and lower case letters

Cognitive Skills Developed by Fast ForWord Reading Prep

• Working memory
• Visual - spatial memory
• Visual attention
• Sustained & selective attention
• Auditory & visual processing
• Sequencing ability