Reading Programs For Children With Learning Diabilities
Pathways to the Mind
The Pathways To The Mind reading comprehension program trains students in the critical skills of phonemic awareness, letter-sound associations, and the ability to read and spell words correctly. Our program is based on the Orton-Gillingham approach to teaching reading.
Letters are represented in the colorful pictures to allow for visualization. The imagery and mnemonics are heavily utilized in the program to make it easier for students to learn and remember the sounds. This is especially important for those with weakness in short term memory, phonemic awareness, visual processing and/or rapid naming of visual symbols. The picture cards and, later, plain letters are used in hands on tracking activities to develop the phonemic awareness skills of blending, segmenting and sound manipulation.
Students progress through the program, using various levels of words and materials to develop the ability to automatically sound out words for reading and spelling. The program continues to upper levels of phonics instruction for reading and spelling multisyllable words.
K-1 Reading Level
An introduction into the world of literacy including letter sound relationships, phonemic awareness skills-word awareness, blending, sound isolation, syllable, rhyme, writing in response to reading, vowel emphasis, b and d confusion, sight word recognition, beginning reading, listening and reading comprehension, writing in response to reading.
Through the use of imagery our students learn the meaning of sounds. The kids will move through the process of learning to read and write with enjoyment, confidence and the desire to work towards becoming a stronger reader and writer.
2-3 Reading Level
Students are encouraged to continue their development of literacy skills through decoding instruction, comprehension instruction and writing practice. Skills and strategy coaching in these areas of literacy include phonic knowledge, word patterns, chunking and word attack; using before, during and after reading strategies such as previewing, predicting and visualizing, making inferences, summarizing and self-monitoring.
Through the use if imagery the kids will continue to develop good reading and writing habits in an environment that allows practice of targeted skills and strategies while also encouraging their continued use in school and home.
4-5 Reading Level
The continued use of learning strands including seeing, hearing, tactile and kinesthetic (for example letters can be written in the air.) Students will learn syllabic, morphemic, syntactic, grammatical structures of language and writing. Instruction includes integrative practices that involve reading, spelling and writing together. We stress language patterns that determine word order and sentence structure and the meaning of words and phrases.
6-8 Reading Level
The reinforcement of higher level thinking skills, the use of text structure to teach comprehension skills, students will learn annotation and outlining skills, structural analysis skills, essay writing. Instruction will include how to answer comprehension questions using the main idea and major and minor details.
Typical Gains
For years students have benefited greatly from “Pathways to the Mind.” Although each case is unique, students trained with “Pathways to the Mind” improve 1.5 to 3 grade levels in the areas of phonemic awareness, phonetic decoding and oral reading. Given intervention using “Pathways to the Mind” dramatic improvement is seen. You can see results in more fluent reading that enable students to go beyond phonetically controlled books, improving oral reading skills.
In many cases older students will typically test at a 2nd grade level on phonics skills. These students often soar after being introduced to “Pathways to the Mind,” significantly increasing phonemic awareness skills.
Although cognitively delayed students may need longer and more intensive periods of instruction, they typically make great gains due to the powerful mnemonics and unique multi-sensory techniques.