Ele-Bot Exercise
In Ele-Bot students progress through five speech processing levels. Within each speech processing level, Ele-Bot presents content that covers a range of grammatical content and difficulty.
Students develop English grammar and vocabulary skills by identifying the picture that best represents a sentence or answers a question.
Hoop Nut Exercise
In Hoop Nut students are asked to choose between 2 syllables that sound very similar, such as /ba/ and /da/.
Hoop Nut improves students’ ability to rapidly and accurately recognize confusable sounds. It trains the brain to act quickly so these sounds aren’t blurred together, which often results in a listener having to ask someone to repeat what they said. Our brains must be able to identify these sounds to understand what someone is saying. If a sound is perceived clearly in the first place, it’s easier to recall it clearly later.
Hoop Nut helps students to clearly perceive and represent these easily confusable consonant sounds.
Moon Ranch Exercise
Phonological fluency affects reading fluency. If students are unable to quickly and easily distinguish between all the sounds presented in a word, they may mispronounce or misremember words in a passage.
Building phonological memory and fluency with Moon Ranch can help students strengthen reading skills by training them to hear all of the sounds in a syllable or word.
Robo-Dog Exercise
In Robo-Dog, students listen to a target word and view 2-4 pictures, then click the picture that best represents the target word they just heard. Students work on two separate types of content, phoneme discrimination, and academic vocabulary.
Fluent use of math and science vocabulary is integral to understanding concepts as well as developing and consolidating skills in these domains. If students don’t understand domain-specific vocabulary terms, they are unable to follow classroom instruction or comprehend written text material, which will negatively affect their academic achievement in those subject areas.
Sky Gym Exercise
In Sky Gym, students identify and sequence frequency sweeps—sounds that change in pitch from low to high (“Weeps”) or high to low (“Woops”). What does this have to do with being a good listener and reader? The frequencies and durations of the frequency sweeps resemble some of the rapid transitions in the sounds of the English language.
Use the Three-in-a-Row Worksheet to help the student visualize their progress and become more focused on accuracy and consistency.
Sky Gym improves students’ ability to recognize frequency sweeps quickly and accurately.
Space Commander Exercise
In Space Commander students listen to directions and then follow them by selecting or manipulating one or more tokens (objects) based on color, shape, and/or size.
As students mature and exercise working memory, they develop strategies to enhance their working memory and learning skills. Working memory strategies are also used to enhance retention of story sequences and chronology.
Finally, working memory strategies employed during reading of texts from varied academic disciplines like mathematics, science and history enable the student to further develop study skills as well as integrate content from several subject areas.
Whalien Match Exercise
In Whalien Match students match objects representing different, but similar sounding syllables/words together. Whalien Match exercises students’ auditory processing by helping their brains improve their ability to distinguish these individual sounds and differentiate them from one another in closely related combinations.
Whalien Match helps students develop sound discrimination, phonemic awareness and listening skills.
Interventions for Foundations I
PLEASE PRINT OUT THESE INTERVENTIONS AND KEEP THEM ON FILE TO REFER TO WHEN NECESSARY.
Helpful Interventions for Foundataions I
SKY GYM
This is a processing exercise and many students find it difficult. The student must identify the difference between high, medium and low frequency sweeps.
They must aim to get 9 trials in a row correct and as many 9s as possible in a session.
If 9 is too difficult try getting 3 in a row correct and then another 3 and another and so on.
See attached Three-In-A-Row-Worksheet https://help.scilearn.com/toolbox/docs.htm
Start by giving a tick for every correct trial. When the student gets one wrong, put an “x” and explain that he is about to start a new lot of 9 and not to worry about the one that they have just got wrong. Each time they get one wrong start a new line of 9. If they get 3 in a row wrong then they will go down a level. Some get distracted by the one or two they get wrong and go on to respond incorrectly.
Be sure to emphasise that the wrong one doesn’t matter. If the teacher/parent knows what the correct answer should have been, for example, if they clicked on ‘high’ ‘low’ and it should have been ‘high’ ‘high’ make a note of that next to the ‘x’ as very often we can see a pattern. The student may have difficulty with one particular combination.
Sometimes we name the sounds. The high frequency we call ‘me’ and say it in a high pitched voice. The low frequency we call ‘Joe’ and say it in a low pitch tone.
Other times we visualize the sounds. for example, we say the high tone is like a bird that says ‘tweet!’ which again we say in a high pitched voice and the low tone is like a frog and make a frog sound in a low pitched voice.
If you have access to a piano please play the highest note and the lowest and ask the student which is high and which is low. Gradually over time play the notes closer together until finally they are beside each other on the keyboard all the while asking him the same questions. If you do not have a piano simply use the Virtual Piano and work on that.
http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks2/music/piano/
Or Google it !
Some students like to practice on the demo before starting their exercises.
WHALIEN MATCH
If the student is struggling with this exercise try to help them to understand that this is a memory game and that it helps a lot to develop a systematic way of pairing the phonic sounds/words.
Encourage the student to start on the first row always working from left to right. Then go onto the second row, then the third and then the fourth. This way he will know which Whaliens he has clicked on.
When we start on the first Whalien on the first row ask the student to say what they heard for example ‘cap’ then ask him to make a picture in his mind of that cap and tell you what that picture looks like, “It’s a baseball cap and it’s blue” or “it’s grey like my granddad’s”, then go onto the 2nd Whalien on the first row and do the same ‘cat’ “It’s black and white” then go onto the 3rd and do the same. Then go back to the 1st and ask if they remember what it was, if not, click on it again and try to remember it again doing the same with the 2nd and 3rd. Every time they click they lose a point so we don’t want to click on these three too often. If they can remember three he may remember a fourth as he goes through the 16 Whaliens on the screen. If they cannot remember 3 try 2 but always try to remember more than 1 sound.
This is the beginning of comprehension where the student is trying to remember what they just heard and this exercise will help him greatly later when reading text. It is also great for spellings and tables.
Please see attached word list for this exercise. The student should not refer to this while working on the exercise. He must focus on the sounds of the words. Use it away from the computer in addition to his daily session.
See attached Wordlists.
ROBO-DOG
Make sure that the “Help” mode is switched off. You do this by clicking on the question mark on the screen.
Print out the Error Reports. Look at the Initial and Final Consonant sounds and vowel sounds the student is struggling with. Work on words on the attached list.
Play games like “I spy with my little eye something beginning (or ending) with …”
https://help.scilearn.com/toolbox/docs/Fast_ForWord_Offline_Resources_for_English_Learners.pdf
When teaching the student the phonetic sounds please ensure that everyone teaches the same sound for each letter.
Here is a link to an excellent video which you may find helpful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ksblMiliA8&t=95s
ELEBOT
Print out the Error Report for this Exercise. Work on the areas of difficulty away from the computer and in addition to the daily computer sessions.
See the Elebot section of Foundations I in The Offline Resources for English Learners…
Here you will find much of the content for this exercise.
https://help.scilearn.com/toolbox/docs/Fast_ForWord_Offline_Resources_for_English_Learners.pdf
If you would like me to send you screenshots for this exercise please email me.
SPACE COMMANDER
Look at the Error reports and print them out. Highlight the areas of difficulty and work away from the computer, if necessary.
Find the complete list of instructions in the Space Commander section of the Offline Resources for English Learners.
https://help.scilearn.com/toolbox/docs/Fast_ForWord_Offline_Resources_for_English_Learners.pdf
Colours, Shapes and prepositions can be the issue here.
It may help to work with the concrete. Get a chess board and cut out cardboard shapes, colour them in, and place them on the board. Read out one instruction at a time for the student to follow. If they struggle to remember the entire instruction ask them to tell you what it is they think they heard. This way they are engaging their working memory. Try not to repeat the instruction but give a different one. Start off with the simple instructions first.
MOON RANCH AND HOOP NUT
You will see the written symbols for the sounds written on the screen.
Sit with your student and ask them what they are hearing. Very often it’s not what is being presented to them e.g. ‘ba/da’ but something completely different. Sometimes they really have to force themselves to process/register the correct sound (hearing is not usually the issue).
Remember that the sound has been modified and does sound a bit weird. It’s been proven that it’s easier to train the brain to process sound accurately when we slow the sound down.
MOTIVATION
Here you will find lots of helpful videos including one for motivation.
https://help.scilearn.com/toolbox/docs.htm?Highlight=motivation
Small rewards can be a great motivation. You will know best what your student will enjoy and what they will appreciate.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Joyce
Foundation-I-Whalien Match Word-Lists.pdf
Foundations I - Word Lists
Foundation II
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Elements I
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Elements II
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Reading Readiness
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Reading Level 1
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Reading Level 2
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Leaping Lizards – Exercises
The object of Leaping Lizards is to select the correct response to fill in the blank and complete the sentence.
To work on Leaping Lizards, the student clicks the Go button to start. An incomplete sentence is displayed. In the beginning, the sentence is also spoken aloud. Then, the lizards display four possible responses. The student must click the card with the word, letter, or punctuation mark that best fills in the blank and completes the sentence. Students improve sentence comprehension and vocabulary.
This exercise builds vocabulary, punctuation and capitalisation skills, as well as word morphology, prefixes and suffixes.
Click to View The Exercises on Leaping Lizards
Dog Bone Exercise
The object of Dog Bone is to listen to passages while reading along, then independently re-read passages and answer multiple-choice questions.
To work on Dog Bone, the student clicks the Go button on the podium to start. A page of text from a fiction or nonfiction passage is presented. The exercise poses a question about the text, and the dogs below present four possible responses. The student must click the response that correctly answers the question. Dog Bone helps improve listening comprehension, reading skills, and working memory
Click to View The Exercises on Dog Bone
Ant Antics – Exercises
The object of Ant Antics is to match a picture to its descriptive title.
To work on Ant Antics, the student clicks the Go button on the globe to see a picture projected on the classroom wall. Then, four sentences or phrases are displayed on the notebook. The student must click the sentence or phrase that best describes what is happening in the picture.
Students develop critical reading and sentence comprehension
Click to view The Exercises on Ant Antics
Reading Level 3
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Reading Comprehension
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Reading Assistant Plus
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