A Program for the Most Common Impediment to Reading
A child’s difficulty with phonics can be puzzling to parents.It’s tough not knowing what to do to help your child when they’re facing difficulties with reading. No parent wants to see their child fall behind. They worry about their child’s self-esteem when they don’t develop essential reading skills.
You buy programs to teach your child phonics – matching letters to sounds – but they aren’t working, and your frustration is growing as your child shows no progress. You may ask: Am I doing something wrong?
The answer is no, and here’s why,
Yes, phonics are a step to reading. But not the first step.
The first step is phonemic awareness. Your child cannot learn phonics until she can hear and identify the sounds inside each word. How can a child understand what sound a written word makes if they struggle with identifying sounds as they’re sounded out? It’s like asking a child to correctly sing a song without letting them hear the music first.
Phonemic awareness is the critical pre-reading skill, the key to reading. Early on it helps with sounding out, later on it helps make the decoding process automatic so that reading comprehension can develop comfortably. A 10-year NIH Study states that 88% of children with reading delays had lagging phonemic awareness skills.
And phonemic awareness requires efficient language or auditory processing.
Enter Fast ForWord
Many phonics programs and phonics lessons are frustrating for children as they just do not hear the sounds. While there is some element of phonemics awareness practice in most phonics programs, they do not training the pre-phonemic awareness skill, language processing.
That’s a big part of the cognitive research done by the four neuroscientists who developed Fast ForWord, which takes a different approach to growing reading skills by taking it back a step to the cognitive skill fundamentals.
What Is Fast ForWord?
Fast ForWord combines two powerful scientific disciplines:
- Cognitive research – on the importance of language processing as a pre-phonics skill
- Neuroscience principles – on how the brain can be trained to improve processing
The exercises in each Fast ForWord program focuses on filling gaps in your child’s reading skills by applying neuroscience that helps your child’s brain make connections and develop all the essential pre-reading skills. It specifically woks on the skills that are lagging when a child has difficulty with phonics.
Foundations I and Foundations II are perfect for younger children to help build phonemic awareness through the fun and interactive games. Fast ForWord has different programs that focus on a range of cognitive and reading skills.
Fast ForWord is a series of programs that are worked on sequentially. Students start with Foundations I (or Elements I for older children) which has no text, it’s all about the language processing and related skills that improve phonemic awareness needed to learn pho
Then text is added – syllables and short words in Foundations II(or Elements II). This is where phonics is mastered, more comfortably and with less frustration because students now have the language processing skills to identify the sounds.
FInally, a student moves to the Fast ForWord reading series – where fluency, reading comprehension, eye tracking and a range of reading skills are trained.
Fast ForWord has helped more than 3 million students in 40 different countries build better reading skills. On average, most students learn two years gain in reading in less than six months.
Request a Consult
If your child has difficulty with phonics, give us a call. Being asked to repeat sounds you cannot hear is frustrating for children and confidence eroding. And more importantly, prolonged difficulty can lead to a negative attitude to reading that can be long lasting.
Fast ForWord was designed specidally for this scenario, training processing and phonemic awareness as stepping stones to learning phonics, then reading fluency, then reading comprehension.