—
New Program Features Innovative Approach To Teaching Comprehension.
Tuesday, October 22, 2019. Las Vegas, NV.
Reading Kingdom, the award-winning “Phonics-PLUS” online reading program, is excited to announce the release of its latest new program, Story Smarts. The Story Smarts program represents a significant evolution in how to teach children comprehension. It is the first program that explicitly teaches students how to determine a story’s main idea and how to recapitulate it effectively.
There are two main components in effective reading. One is decoding where a child learns to turn sets of letters into words. The other is comprehension where a child understands the messages that the words convey. Comprehension is a vital skill for academic success, yet it receives little, if any, systematic instruction —particularly in the early grades.
The emphasis in early reading is on decoding. The assumption is that once the words are decoded, children will be able to understand the written messages. To the extent that comprehension is taught, most instruction relies on children being asked to recall details in a text. But the ability to recall details does not lead to comprehending the main idea. Children can get by in the early grades, but once they make the transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” (around 4th grade) the increased demands for comprehension skills often plunge them into a world of textual complexity for which they are unprepared.
Ideally, the basis for effective reading comprehension should be established from the outset — well before the texts are long and complex. That is what Story Smarts is designed to do. And because many of the skills are taught via spoken language, the program can also be used with children who are not yet effectively decoding.
Story Smarts is composed of 30 stories, that steadily increase in complexity, accompanied by sophisticated, but easy to use lessons that teach the key components of comprehension, including the “main idea.” Story Smarts also teaches both the skill of retelling and the sequencing of pictures so that the pictures tell the story.
Story Smarts’ stories and associated activities have been carefully crafted to enable children to grasp, in a relatively short time, the essence of a story and its retelling. The skills that are taught include:
• grasping details that are essential to the story;
• retaining the sequence of information that is central to the story’s meaning;
• seeing how the actions of the central characters affect the outcome of the story through animation;
• learning to comprehend stories of increasing length
• reporting the ideas in the complete sentences needed for imparting a story
• becoming comfortable with and skilled in the critical skill of recognizing the main idea
Story Smarts is ideal for children 5-8, but it can also be used with older children who have difficulties in reading.
Find out more at: www.StorySmarts.com
The Story Smarts program is based on the work of Dr. Marion Blank and Dr. Laura Berlin. Dr. Blank is a world-renowned literacy and language expert who created and directed the Light on Literacy Program at Columbia University. Dr. Berlin is a psychologist specializing in the development of language and learning.
Reading Kingdom is a developer of innovative educational curricula including www.ReadingKingdom.com, an online reading and writing program for neurotypical children, and www.ASDReading.com, a literacy and language program for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and other learning disabilities.
# # #
Release ID: 88929629