Summer has hit…Steps to take to

Improve Learning Skills Over the Summer

Here is a practical ‘down and dirty’ Action plan to Improve Learning Skills

1. Decompress, take a breather for a few days. Few is the key word here – take a few days to decompress and then you are re-invigorated to get going.

2. Go through your papers and books that you used this past school year. What areas were easy, what areas were hard?

3.  After sorting out the easy and hard, let’s start addressing the hard areas, the areas that were more difficult for you. There is an underlying root cause of the learning struggles. You may want to go through our informal comprehensive screening tool to identify the underlying causes of your child’s learning problems to see exactly why they have a hard time with reading, writing, spelling, study skills, or math.

4. Develop an action plan to address the root causes of your child’s struggles that will push them forward so that when school starts in the fall they will be ready. Remember, if your child struggles with learning or just takes too long to do their homework, there is a reason for it. Once you identify the underlying root cause of their learning struggle and address it, the ‘magic’ happens. Learning becomes easy.

5.  Your action plan should be simple, just take about 20 minutes a day so you actually do implement it. There is nothing worse than developing a plan of action to work on your child’s learning skills but then get overwhelmed by it. No one does well in a state of overwhelm. In fact, most often almost nothing gets accomplished when you are in a state of overwhelm. So, keep your plan simple but effective. This is one plan that has been extremely effective over the years for me.

• Put your summer learning skills plan into action – 20 minutes a day
• Day One: improving reading fluency in 5 minutes, improving spelling in 15 minutes
• Day Two: fluency in 5 minutes, reading a selection 5 minutes, note taking in 10 minutes.
• Rotate activities every other day.

6.  Play learning games to improve learning skills … have a game day or game night each week and play learning games

See the improve learning skills games in action.

Improve Learning Skills: Summer organizational tips…

1. Store the best samples of your child’s work. I keep one box per child.

2. Then, just start throwing other things away.

3. Store what you want to save for use another year, and then make a pile of items that you can give away or sell.

4. Getting rid of all of the “stuff” just sitting around will help to eliminate visual clutter and may reveal some learning items that you had totally forgotten!

5. You CAN do it. Don’t keep putting it off. Even if you can’t get it all done in one day, you can still make some progress. It’s going to be worth it! And, you’ll have greater focus so you can improve learning skills in 20 minutes a day.

Playing Reading Comprehension Game

Improves Learning Skills

What if you could play a game and improve your child’s reading and listening comprehension at the same time? It also sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? But a game really can improve reading comprehension. As a learning disability specialist and board certified educational therapist I have probably worked with every type of reading problem, dyslexia, learning disability imaginable over my 37 years or teaching.

Reading Comprehension Problems

Many of my students had reading comprehension problems. They were very frustrated with their reading assignments. It was so hard for them when they had to read their social studies book and answer the questions at the end of the chapter. And they would often read the chapter multiple times and still not be able to answer the reading comprehension questions.
The problem was, no one had taught my students how to read for meaning. There is a specific way you read for reading comprehension. There is a certain way to listen for listening comprehension.

Solution to Reading Comprehension and Listening Comprehension Problems

As a result of teaching frustrated students of all ages, students that had given up on being able to understand what they had read, I decided to create a game that would teach them how to read for meaning and improve their reading comprehension. I knew from both working with my students and from research on learning that game playing was a great way to teach and reinforce skills. So I developed The Comprehension Zone: Rocket Rap to help them improve their skills.

What The Comprehension Zone: Rocket Rap™ did for our child:

“The Comprehension Zone: Rocket Rap had amazing results for one of our children.   We have been working with him on comprehension for years.  I often have him draw pictures of what I’m reading, we act things out and we read just a few phrases at a time and ask him questions whenever we are dealing with auditory learning.  He simply struggles in this area.  I was interested to see how he would do with Rocket Rap.

We began playing Rocket Rap often.  The improvement was rapid and dramatic!  By the end of the second game he was able to play successfully and currently it is easy enough for him to pick out facts while listening that he likes to try reading the card himself.

For the first time in his life our child will raise his hand when Mark asks questions during family worship and he will know the answer.  He will come up to us after church and spontaneously tell us something that he learned from the sermon.  He is so amazingly proud of himself and I’m amazingly thankful.

For our child who has always struggled with comprehension, for these results, I would happily pay double.  We’ve tried things similar to this in the past, we’ve been focused on this problem for years, but Rocket Rap has been the first activity that has been successful.”

Kimberly from RaisingOlives.com

4 Activities to Improve Reading Skills

(Part 3 – Reading Comprehension)

As a parent you do have the power and ability to help your kids improve their reading skills. Now what I mean here is that you as a parent can help your child whether they have an identified learning disability, dyslexia, ADHD, or are gifted. There are 4 easy to implement activities that each take just a few minutes a day to improve reading.

1. Improve reading fluency in 5 minutes a day
2. Improve spelling and learn the 8 ways we put letters together to make words
3. Improve reading comprehension by playing a reading comprehension game
4. Improve writing skills using specially designed graphic organizers

Improve Reading Skills Activities

The first activity you can do to help your child improve reading skills  just takes 5 minutes a day - reading fluency. The second activity which is helping your children improve reading skills is by helping your children improve their spelling skills (about 12 minutes). The third activity is to play games with your children. The key here is to play games that are specifically designed to improve reading comprehension.

So, the third activity is playing a reading comprehension game. That’s right, game playing! Playing The Comprehension Zone, a reading comprehension game, teaches your kids how to read for the main idea and details or sequence what they read does the trick.

So many children struggle with reading comprehension, specifically finding the main idea of what they are reading or finding details that support the main idea or for sequential order. This can be daunting for some students, and not just those students with LD, dyslexia, or ADHD. You don’t have to have a learning disability to have difficulty with reading comprehension! Even gifted children sometimes struggle with reading comprehension.

Think about how difficult note-taking is when you don’t have a clue about the main idea of what you read. Typically you either stare at blank sheets of paper or you copy everything down, not knowing how to pick out the important information.

Play Reading Game to Improve Reading Skills

To be able to play a game and learn, practice, and reinforce the skill of pulling out the main idea and the details or putting information into sequential order at the same time is quite something. Additionally, this  reading game can be played for both reading comprehension or listening comprehension.

One of the beauties of playing games that improve reading skills, teach, and reinforce skills is that you are in a relaxed state when you are playing. Leaning is retained more efficiently when your body is not in a tense fight or flight state. Using games to learn skills is a way to learn in a non-threatening way.

Games even help and encourage learners to stay interested and they often work happier and longer without even realizing it.

Lee Su Kim states:
‘There is a common perception that all learning should be serious and solemn in nature, and that if one is having fun and there is hilarity and laughter, then it is not really learning. This is a misconception. It is possible to learn a language as well as enjoy oneself at the same time. One of the best ways of doing this is through games.’

‘There are many advantages of using games to improve reading skills in the classroom:

1. Games are a welcome break from the usual routine of the language class.
2. They are motivating and challenging.
3. Learning a language requires a great deal of effort. Games help students to make and sustain the effort of learning.
4. Games provide language practice in the various skills- speaking, writing, listening and reading.
5. They encourage students to interact and communicate.
6. They create a meaningful context for language use.’
Creative Games for the Language Class ‘Forum’ Vol. 33 No 1, January – March 1995, Page 35

So, be sure to include games like The Comprehension Zone in your family’s activities. Your children will benefit from them. And, you will be spending quality time with your children and be helping them improve their reading comprehension skills at the same time.

Can you do your own summer learning program?

Should you do your own summer learning program?

Fact: More than half of the achievement gap present in 9th grade between lower- and higher-income children can be explained by summer learning loss.

Make Learning Stick with learning games and reading fluency training over the summer. There are many things you can do at home to bridge that summer learning gap.

1. Reading Fluency using Five Minutes to Better Reading Skills…and Yes…it only takes 5 minutes to do. Sally Shawitz, author of Overcoming Dyslexia states, “I urge parents to make fluency training their number one priority.”
2. Take a weekly trip …to the zoo, a local park, the pool, the river, a local factory…and afterwards as a family write down what you did and what your favorite part was…using the fill-in-the-blank forms from Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills and create a booklet to keep for all of your weekly trips.
3. Do some nature activities such as listening to outdoor sounds, nature rubbings, shape hike, incher hikes … again use the fill-in-the-blank forms from Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills to describe what you found or did.
4. Activities to do at home like making puppets and putting on a puppet show. Bake cookies together, have a backwards day where you eat dinner in the morning and breakfast in the evening, do add-on-stories. Again write down your favorite things or worse things about the activity.
5. Have a Game Night or a Game Day…choose learning games…they are fun as well as work on skills. Some great ones are The Sentence Zone (play & learn sentence building and grammar while having fun) , The Comprehension Zone (play & learn reading comprehension and listening comprehension), or the Math Zone (play & math calculation practice).
6. Read books together…and write a review or report on it, or have a review night where you all act as book reviewers of the book you read.

Check out the books, games, and guides here:

Reading

Writing

Math

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

What can you do during the winter weather to help your kids improve their skills? This question is a frequent one for me. Parents are always interested in helping their kids, but it is sometimes hard to stay motivated, especially during the winter months.

The following activities work well with all kids, whether they have dyslexia, LD, ADHD, are falling through the cracks, or are gifted. I have done the activities successfully with all of them!

I have two favorite things to do to not only help my kids, but to stay motivated doing it too. The first thing is to have more frequent game nights, playing educational games – learning games like The Sentence Zone, The Comprehension Zone, or The Math Zone. When you play games with your kids, they build skills while having fun and get a lot of modeling from you too. At the same time you get to have quality family time, so it is a double win situation.

The other activity I like to do is to have an evening where I might turn the heat up a degree or two, and everyone gets dressed in ‘summer’ clothes, and we have a ‘picnic’ on the floor of the living room. Afterwards, we might tell stories to each other – what I call ‘add-on stories.’ In these stories one person starts off and then the next person adds on to the story. We keep going round and round and the story gets longer and longer. The only thing is, the kids have to pay attention and so do you, so what you add on makes sense to the story. This builds listening comprehension and memory as well as a really good time.

Hope this is helpful!

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

Hi Bonnie,

I’d like to place an order for a product of yours, but I have not been able to locate any age or grade range for any of the items.  Can you tell me for whom the Comprehension Zone is appropriate?

Thanks,
Susan Taber

Bonnie Terry Learning – Review of The Comprehension Zone: Rocket Rap

This review is difficult for me to write because this product had such a dramatic and positive effect for one of our children.  It has been an answer to prayer, a break-through for our child who has struggled with auditory comprehension for years.  I am grateful for the opportunity to use this product that we would not have otherwise had access to,  thankful for God’s sovereignty that our family was chosen for this review and that the vendor determined to send us this particular product (as part of the TOS Bloggers Program).

So as you read this review realize that I’m not unbiased, know that I’m indebted to this product for helping my child in a way that I had failed to help him on my own and take from it what you will.

Bonnie Terry Learning focuses on products for the struggling learner.  The goal is to enable you to be better equipped to develop strong reading, writing and math skills in your child with dyslexia, ADD, Autism or other general learning difficulties.  Even gifted children can struggle in some of these areas and Bonnie Terry aims at smoothing out those bumps in the road of education.  They try to help you “think outside the box” to address your child’s difficulties from an angle, direction or perspective that you may not have considered, a direction that may be the difference between success or struggle for your child.  Bonnie Terry offers a variety of games and products to improve reading, writing, math and study skills for children 7 years and older.

Bonnie Terry Learning sent our family The Comprehension Zone: Rocket Rap ($67).  Rocket Rap is geared for 1st  grade through adult to help develop and strengthen reading or listening comprehension.  The game comes with 3 sets of cards written at different reading/listening levels (2nd-3rd grade, 4th-6th grade and 7th-12th grade).  Each set of cards can be used in several different ways.  Children can find the factual information, the main point or work on sequencing.  Children are able to read the cards themselves or may listen as you read to them in order to work on either reading or listening comprehension.  This versatility makes it easy to play the game with children at multiple reading/listening levels at the same time.  The cards are self-correcting and include hints to help your child succeed and even allow for using a helper in the scoring.

The Rocket Rap game consists of a high-quality, over-sized vinyl game mat, 3 sets of cards, four playing pieces and a die.  Play progresses by the child reading or listening to the paragraph on the card.  Then they complete their task depending on their level.  Beginners name two facts from the card, intermediates relay the main point of the paragraph AND two facts and advanced students use several cards at a time and put them in the proper chronological order.  Each time the child completes their task they get to roll the die and move.  If they need to use one of the helpers you take one point off of their roll.

All of our children from 1st grade up were able to play together, which as you know is an important feature for our family.  Our older children (10, 11 and 13) were able to easily complete the comprehension activities on all levels of cards, but enjoyed working on the sequencing.  Our 9 year old was happy to play with the 7th-12th grade cards.   The game was interesting enough to the kids that they wanted to play multiple times, even when some of the novelty had worn off.

Pros:

* multi-level play

* nice, high quality game

* lots of fun facts about people and planets included on the cards

* improves focus on the task at hand

* gives older children an opportunity to read out loud

* ability to focus on several different aspects of comprehension

Cons:

* price

* there should be more cards (in my opinion)

* not a fast-paced, edge of your seat type of game, but our children all enjoyed playing it, so what can I say?

What Rocket Rap did for our child:

The Comprehension Zone: Rocket Rap had amazing results for one of our children.   We have been working with him on comprehension for years.  I often have him draw pictures of what I’m reading, we act things out and we read just a few phrases at a time and ask him questions whenever we are dealing with auditory learning.  He simply struggles in this area.  I was interested to see how he would do with Rocket Rap.

I began with the easiest level.  I read the card to him and he was to tell me 2 facts from the card.  When it was time for him to answer all I got was a blank stare.  When prompted with the helpers, he was still unable to answer.  I was honestly shocked that he could not do this.  The cards we were using only have 3-5 sentences, are chock full of facts and he couldn’t pick out one.  I ended up modifying the game for him, rather than have him tell me two facts per card to earn one roll of the die, I gave him one roll of the die for each fact he could pick out and we used lots of helpers.  He was still unable to finish the game.

We began playing Rocket Rap more often.  The improvement was rapid and dramatic!  By the end of the next game he was able to play without my previous modifications and currently it is easy enough for him to pick out facts while listening that he likes to try reading the card himself.

For the first time in his life our child will raise his hand when Mark asks questions during family worship and he will know the answer.  He will come up to us after church and spontaneously tell us something that he learned from the sermon.  He is so amazingly proud of himself and I’m amazingly thankful.

Final thoughts:

As I mentioned this is a tough review.  For 8 of our children this game would be a fun, helpful activity that is not worth $67, but for one child, for these results, I would happily pay double.  We’ve tried things similar to this in the past, we’ve been focused on this problem for years, but Rocket Rap has been the first activity that has been successful.

If you have a child who struggles with reading or listening comprehension, I certainly think that Bonnie Terry’s The Comprehension Zone: Rocket Rap is worth a look.  If any of you decide to go this route, I’d love to hear what you think.  Have our results been typical?

You may read more reviews of Rocket Rap and other Bonnie Terry Learning products at The Old Schoolhouse Homeschool Crew blog.  You may read more of my homeschool curriculum reviews on my review page.

Bonnie Terry Learning sent The Comprehension Zone: Rocket Rap to our family free of charge (part of the TOS Bloggers Program) to enable me to write this review.  All opinions expressed are my own and I am not otherwise reimbursed for any reviews here on Raising Olives.

Hi Bonnie,

I’d like to place an order for a product of yours, but I have not been able to locate any age or grade range for any of the items.  Can you tell me for whom the Comprehension Zone is appropriate?

Thanks,

Susan Taber

Hi Susan,

The Comprehension Zone can be used from 2nd grade – 12th grade (reading levels) or when played for listening comprehension, from 1st & up.

The Comprehension Zone comes with 3 sets of cards – 2-3 reading level, 4-6 reading level, and 7-12 reading level. It can be played simultaneously with all levels. Can also be played for listening comprehension at a level that is higher than the students reading level.

All of my products are multi-age/grade level because I primarily taught from 1st – 12th in my classrooms and/or center. I transition my kids that were in kindergarten as soon as I can into using the products, but never had too many that were in kindergarten. I am able to use the products with 1st – 12th.

Hope this helps,

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

There is another solution to this that I use along with the Ten Minutes to Better Studying Skills. This solution can also be used very effectively at home, with a tutor, in a resource classroom, or in an elementary, middle school, or high school class.

I have learned from years of experience and research that game playing helps my students to relax while learning. When you are in a relaxed state you are able to concentrate better and retain information better.

“Relaxation techniques will improve concentration, learning, and overall memory ability.” Gary Small, M. D., Professor of Psychiatry & Bio-behavioral Sciences at UCLA

So, I play two games to work on vocabulary and comprehension. One, The Sentence Zone works on both building vocabulary and grammar skills. In fact, a definition cheat sheet is provided for the more difficult words. In the game the students learn how to make grammatically correct sentences. They also learn the 6 basic sentence types in the English language.

The second game, The Comprehension Zone: Rocket Rap works on helping students with how to pull out the main idea and details of what they read. Both games provide plenty of modeling where students can improve their vocabulary and comprehension while playing. Following is an article I recently wrote regarding The Comprehension Zone: Rocket Rap.

Improve Vocabulary and Comprehension With Game Playing

Do you ever watch your child take notes from what they are reading or read the notes they have taken and wonder why in the world they write that note and miss the important part of the passage? Were they just writing anything down so they could say they were finished? Did they even think about it?

Sometimes my children and my students weren’t sure about which notes to write in the fill-in-the-blank graphic organizing forms. Sometimes they put in a very small detail and left out the most important fact. For instance, they would put down that Jupiter has a ring of dust around it and miss that it is the biggest planet. Or that Washington cut down the cherry tree and didn’t tell a lie but miss that he was the first president.

To help them to become really good note takers, I realized they needed practice with finding the main idea as well as supporting details. I knew that they would really get good at this skill if they had a lot of modeling and practice. So I developed a comprehension game where they would get a lot of practice with both reading and listening comprehension.

In fact, research from the Center for Research on Learning developed a strategy called the Paraphrasing Strategy to improve reading comprehension. The way The Comprehension Zone is played is supported by their research.

The game format helped my kids learn how to read for meaning while they played a game. The object of the game is to either find the main idea, the details, both of those, or to sequence what they had read.

Being able to play a game while learning those skills really helped improved the quality of their note taking and writing. It also improved their understanding of new vocabulary. For discounts, check out The Reading Pack.

I hope this has been helpful.

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., Board Certified Educational Therapist #10167

P.S.: Feel free to pass this post to anyone you think might enjoy it.