Mind Matters Clinics - Services - Praxis I and Praxis II

Reading Program

At Home Service For Fluency and Comprehension

Is it time to deal with your child's reading difficulties, once and for all? Mind Matters Clinics provides a one-time program that builds underlying cognitive skills and reading mechanics to make reading more efficient. Easier reading leads directly to academic success, less homework stress and more confidence.

Helps slow or reluctant readers, fluency and comprehension
For children 5 years of age and older, teens and adults
At home with remote professional oversight
Only 30 minutes a day for 4 – 8 weeks
Proven software that has helped over one million students

A One Time Program
Our powerful clinical software, Fast ForWord, builds reading skills from the foundation up. It first builds the fundamental cognitive skills required for reading -- listening and language dexterity, followed by exercises that work on fluency, spelling and language structure, followed finally by age appropriate exercises that build reading comprehension and thinking skills. These are enduring gains that are exercised every day when your child listens and reads.

Decoding Is The Key To Reading
Fluent decoding is the most important skill in reading. If decoding is not automatic, reading comprehension is compromised. Unfortunately, decoding is a difficult skill because it requires the ability to pull apart words in your head, i.e., to hear "cat" as |c| |a| |t|. Hearing those individual sounds requires the ability to process at natural language speed, up to 40 sounds a second.

Not surprisingly, many students never do learn to decode automatically, and so it diverts concentration from reading comprehension. This exhausting multi-tasking -- decoding and comprehending -- means they toil with reading throughout their school careers.

Decoding Requires Accurate Processing
The underlying impediment to easy decoding is weak auditory processing. Sometimes it shows up in a child's language, but often it only comes into play in reading where the processing speed requirement is much higher.

Processing Skills Are Not Hard Wired; They Can Be Improved
Scientists now know that the brain is has much more in common with a muscle than a hard-wired computer. It is plastic, meaning that it can adapt and change if exercised appropriately. Auditory processing is one such skill that will respond dramatically to exercise. Fast ForWord software strengthens auditory processing skills to help children and adults become good readers.

Reading Program Steps
We train the brain to process faster and more accurately so that the student can hear the sounds inside words, phonemes, more clearly and comfortably. Our program, Fast ForWord uses repetition with gradual increases in speed and complexity to achieve automaticity in reading -- effortless, natural decoding.

Here are the steps in our process:

Build a secure cognitive foundation. We start by strengthening processing and other related cognitive skills required to make fluent decoding possible, called reading MAPS -- Memory, Attention, Processing and Sequencing.
Develop reading fluency. With the cognitive foundation set, we then teach the spelling, vocabulary and language structure so that students will find all text familiar and expected, further improving decoding speed and fluency.
Reading comprehension (literal). We start with sentence comprehension and small paragraphs. Our program helps students to routinely think while reading and to read accurately -- often undoing prior bad habits such as word skipping. We also build vocabulary knowledge and grammar skills, all required for reading comprehension.
Critical reading (middle school and up). The final step is reading with meta-cognition, the ability to think about what you are reading -- to self-adjust, make inferences and think critically.

Following completion of the Fast ForWord program; additional phonetic instruction may be required.

Again, this is a cutting edge program, Reading Horizons, which will bring your child’s reading ability to grade level or above. The program is completed in our clinic and the children are seen for 2 to 4 times a week, for an hour each session. Every student goes through the program at their own pace, but typically they complete the program in about forty hours.