All remedial programs have a practice component. You learn a concept or a skill, then you practice it. But how much practice is needed for each skill? And how often should that practice take place? If your student is not acquiring the basic skills in reading, arithmetic facts, or keyboarding, he/she needs extra practice sessions a few times per day, every day. It is almost impossible for schools to arrange custom exercises and then provide a daily schedule of practice.
CyberSlate gives you the missing component; one-minute custom fluency exercises in a computer application that makes daily practice convenient. The custom exercises are one minute fluencies using decks of practice materials matched to your student’s program. But more important, CyberSlate adds a scientific component by plotting the results of each session on a Celeration chart, revealing the extent of improvement after each practice session! When your student masters a component of a skill, CyberSlate moves him on to the next component. If he is stuck – not making progress – he can use the practice screens to rehearse before a timing, or he can increase the number of sessions per day.
CyberSlate has other built in motivators.
- The Menu Screen lists each fluency with a To do: number. Our students use this number as a motivator, trying to get all of their fluencies down to To do: 0, or even up to Bonus: 2.
- Students earn points whenever they beat their previous score. These points are announced on the “Finished” panel at the end of each fluency. When they pass a sub-level, level, or rank, that information is printed in blue on the panel. Most of our slow readers look for the blue print first, because they know this means that the improved score earned points.
- Large skill sets like “fluent reading”, touch typing, or “knowing my addition facts” are hard to define and take weeks to accomplish. We have sliced the skills into Levels and Ranks so that students can aim for goals that might be accomplished in a few days.
If these interventions do not work, you can ask our CyberSlate experts to join you in examining the chart and diagnosing what other practice exercises are needed to build the necessary subskills.
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